Hacker News Reader

bluedonutson MVCC – the part of PostgreSQL we hate the most (2023)

Loved this post! Could anyone recommend a book (or other medium) with similar content about RMBDS internals?

bluedonutson U.S. No Longer Ranks Among 20 Happiest Countries

This was doing the news rounds recently 'UK second most miserable country' so surely something doesnt add up.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/latest-updates/uk-i...

bluedonutson Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

Because when the grocery store employee picks the fruit for you online order they don’t care about getting the ripe ones with no blemishes.

Additionally they seem to always pick the perishables with the closest expiry date. IE milk from the front of the shelf that is expiring tomorrow rather than the stuff at the back that has 7 days before expiry.

bluedonutson Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging

Taurine is said to have an anti-anxiety effect. I have taken it for this reason and believe it is effective (or placebo ..).

My assumption was it helps ease the stimulant effects of all the other stuff in energy drinks.

bluedonutson Show HN: Lander, a lunar lander style web game

Basically a fender bender, but you landed

Score: 53.6 point landing Speed: 9.8mph Angle: 1.4° Time: 566 seconds Flips: 182 Max speed: 635.2mph Max height: 62510ft Engine used: 109 times Boosters used: 145 times https://ehmorris.com/lander/

bluedonutson Detroit Industry Murals

If you want to learn more about these murals this might be of interest - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pm01

bluedonutson I hacked an office telephone to play Doom

Around 10 years ago i worked in a company that had lots of software and physical VOIP phones. One of the models of phone had a pretty nice colour screen on it. I forget the brand .. it might have been polycom.

At that time I was very much into nmap'ing everything and noticed that these devices had all sorts of interesting ports open including telnet and ftp. FTP was read only for anonymous but it was trivial to download and crack the passwd file and discover that the admin password was something like 1234. My colleagues and I only got as far as showing images on the screen to surprise people but my imagination was running wild with the surveillance possibilities (let alone doom!).

This was one of my first glimpses as how bad security on commercial embedded devices can be.

bluedonutson Once the disease of gluttonous aristocrats, gout is now tormenting the masses

The reason the OP mentioned those people (including Da Vinci) is because they are all known gout sufferers.

bluedonutson Once the disease of gluttonous aristocrats, gout is now tormenting the masses

I have been suffering from gout for the last 4 years or so (36 y/o now) with roughly 1 attack per year, prominently in the right big toe. There is a history of gout in my family. More recently I've had the odd time where I have mild symptoms - pain in foot rather than toe and still able to limp around without too much issue. I have wanted to avoid taking allopurinol daily and have done a lot of research to find more natural / dietary solutions without really finding any silver bullet. Interesting things i have come across:

1. There is at least one study showing Lemon Juice it can lower uric acid levels in humans[1] seemingly by lowering PH of urine.

2. Tart cherry juice is mentioned a lot as a cure. There are a quite a few studies[2]. Make sure and get the tart cherry (Montmorency) juice, you can get it in a concentrated syrup. My uncle says he has not had an attack since he started drinking a generic supermarket tart juice every day. I have never had an attack whilst taking cherry juice but i haven't been taking it consistently.

3. Interesting article linking fructose and gout which matched my intuition a lot more than the link with meat - https://tim.blog/2009/10/05/gout/

4. Hot bath with epsom salts seems to temporarily ease symptoms.

I personally haven't noticed a correlation between eating meat / fish and gout attacks. I have gone from eating meat twice a day to about once a week now and there has been no noticeable change in the gout.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03044...

[2] https://www.fasebj.org/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.25.1_supplemen...

bluedonutson Tokyo's audiophile venues (2016)

Its really going to depend on budget.

At this level of quality of speaker the accoustic properties of the room (and the location of the speakers) will have a bigger impact on the quality of the sound than spending more money on kit.

I have the M040 which are a newer and more environmentally friendly model aimed at bedroom producers (i believe). There is also a cheaper M030 model.

The M series offer only basic room response controls (e.g. if the speaker is located near a wall or in a corner). The parent alludes to much fancier calibration achieved with the use of a mic and DSP's in the speakers.

The other thing worth noting is that genelecs are very neutral sounding speakers and also (as they are designed as nearfield studio monitors) have a relatively small sweet spot. So maybe not the best choice to fill a big room at a party, but I love them very much :)

bluedonutson 12.1T Digits of Pi

I wondered the same, according to the site its not possible to parallelize:

http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/faq.html#distributed

The nth digit type computations are too slow.

bluedonutson Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel

That's not even accounting that Hetzner doesn't bill incoming and internal traffic, which AWS does.

This is incorrect. AWS does not charge for incoming traffic nor does it charge for internal traffic within the same zone.

bluedonutson How a domain registrar can kill your business

We spend lot of time thinking about making our services resilient against failure at the infrastructure level yet the domain registrar is often overlooked.

Not only do you have to worry about them making a technical mistake there is also the risk of a phishing attack.

A while back I did a bit of research about what was the most reliable registrar and the only one that i could find was Markmonitor. Most of the big sites (google.com facebook.com etc) use them. They offer lots of cool features that i had never heard of like registrar level locking and custom 'protocols' (like a phonecall from X no. of authorised people) to validate a change. Plus some others that seemed less interesting (to me) such as the brand protection.

They do of course charge a pretty penny. From memory there was a minimum cost of $30k per year which allowed you pretty much as many domains as you might want and the promise of being able to get ahold of a human if something goes wrong.

bluedonutson MacBook Pro? No

I was kinda onboard untill “bring the lit Apple logo back”. What’s professional about that?

bluedonutson Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

Do we know that the kernel used in OSX is vulnerable at all? I haven’t found any discussion of it.

bluedonutson The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches

We had a large % of our longer running instances have scheduled reboots in Dec.

Is it linked and if so does that mean AWS have already patched?

bluedonutson LastPass RCE vulnerability fixed

Long time unhappy user of Lastpass here. Would really like to hear what alternatives people are using that have at least the following features:

1. Mac/Window/Linux support 2. Ability to control accounts from an admin account. PW/2FA reset, export/wipe of accounts etc. 3. Reasonably secure 4. Not too terrible to use for Engineers/non-techies alike.

bluedonutson Ask HN: Is S3 down?

You can use the Google cloud storage connector (https://cloud.google.com/hadoop/google-cloud-storage-connect...) which works with hadoop (and therefore spark).

bluedonutson [dead]

Due to network issues in AWS us-west (https://status.aws.amazon.com/) or conincidental...

bluedonutson Dyn Analysis Summary of Friday October 21 Attack

I wonder what 1.2Tb would do if pointed at a ELB or an AZ in AWS. Someone must have tried at some point but i've never heard of any widespread outages caused by DDOS on AWS. Is it just that bandwidth available to an AWS datacenter is that much bigger than what dyn have?

bluedonutson Context aware MySQL pools via HAProxy

This is cool. I dont think it would be useful in my case though.

99% of the time the cause of lag I see is some heavy inserts on the master. These hit the slaves at the same time so this wouldn't mitigate that issue.

It got me to wondering, what is the common cause of slave lag for other people?

bluedonutson Ask HN: What will IPV6 migration actually look like?

AWS does support ipv6 in ELBs in a fashion. ELBs will have both an ipv6 and a dual stack DNS entry created for them, in addition to the ipv4.

example.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com (A Record)

ipv6.example.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com (AAAA Record)

dualstack.example.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com (A or AAAA Record)

These records will only be displayed for ELBs in classic despite existing and being resolvable for VPC ELBs. The twist is that there is no way to add security groups with ipv6 addresses in VPC so its not possible to receive requests.

Amusingly this means ELBs in classic have an advantage on VPC when it comes to ipv6.

bluedonutson Riemann – A network monitoring system

We use Riemann to track all requests on Apis amongst other things. Have become rather fond of it. It happily handles 40k events p/s on rather modest hardware. The dashboard is not the prettiest but it is functional. Overall it has proved invaluable for spotting anomalies in our metrics.