cloakandswagger

What principles? I can't find a mission statement or list of principles on their site, and it wasn't long ago that Cloudflare joined GoDaddy and others in shutting down the Daily Stormer -- one of the principles of a CDN might be supporting a free and open internet, but that isn't supported by their actions.

He said it was difficult, not impossible.

I think it's a fairly noncontroversial statement. Dealing with eventual consistency is always going to be more difficult and require more careful thought and preparation than immediately consistent systems.

How many programmers do you think are out there that have only ever worked on systems that use a single RDBMS instance, and what would happen if they tried to apply their techniques to a distributed, eventually consistent environment?

Except that Iran [1] and the US [2] have successfully synthesized Novichok, and a Cornell professor of organic chemistry stated that any organic chemist with state-backing could synthesize the agent [3].

[1] http://www.spectroscopynow.com/details/ezine/1591ca249b2/Ira...

[2] https://medium.com/@gregclay/usa-synthesized-novichok-in-199...

[3] https://twitter.com/davidbcollum/status/998613563680882694?l...

Remember when Julian Assange had rape charges magically materialize against him the same month that Wikileaks released US diplomatic cables?

Less messy than poisoning I suppose.

How do you know that the Russian government was behind it?

For a while I shared the mentality that Russia was unequivocally bad and the anti-thesis of all Western values of freedom. It was like common knowledge to me.

But with every breathless proclamation like yours of Russia as a cartoon villain I started to have doubts. It seemed like everything was suddenly Russia's fault--they were the absolute root of all evil in the world. Anyone who disagreed was obviously a Russian bot.

The last straw for me was when Theresa May declared, without any doubt, that the Russian state had attempted to assassinate two British citizens using nerve agents (10 days after the fact, before the conclusion of any investigation and without any concrete evidence to implicate Russia).

This Russia-phobia is dangerous. We have made a bogeyman and a scapegoat out of a desperate, nuclear-equipped nation that less than 30 years ago had its federation, economy and national identity shattered. I'm afraid that this delusion won't stop until a full on conflict breaks out which should be a much scarier prospect than yet-another-evil-dictatorship.

This seems like a stupidly conspicuous location to setup a meth lab unless you assume that not a single person visits the facility for months at a time and no one would notice large plumes of smoke rising from it.

And also the grown adults who enjoy gambling responsibly?

As journalistic integrity degrades so does general comportment it seems.

I've noticed a lot of juvenile or outright vulgar language choice in reporting lately, as journalists are abandoning any effort to appear professional or dispassionate.

Yes I said as much in my comment. There is still opportunity cost to all of these experiments which is especially impactful to a company as small as Valve.

I'm going to discontinue this as you are getting upset and increasingly personal, I'd ask that you try to be more thoughtful with your comments in the future.

I suspect there is quite a bit of turmoil inside the walls of Valve right now due to a series of large, failed bets that will eventually threaten their cash-cow platform.

> Steam controller/Steam Link

Huge flop. These are being practically given away now as Valve looks to get rid of their excess inventory. This being hardware, it had to be an expensive venture that failed to penetrate the living room.

> Steam machines

Another stinker, though Valve was able to successfully offload most of the risk onto OEMs with this one. Opportunity cost still bites.

> VR

I commend Valve for putting all their chips in on this, but it looks like the VR industry had yet another cold start. This will go down as an almost total loss.

All the while Valve has been neglecting game development which, while admittedly much more expensive and less rewarding than running a sales platform, ensures that there's a sufficient amount of first party titles to keep users on Steam.

With the advent of Fortnite and competing platforms from other triple-A studios, it's not so farfetched to imagine a complete fracturing of the games platform market over the next 5-10 years. Valve needs a return-to-roots moment to prevent this from happening

From your original comment:

> Ah yes, "groundbreaking collaboration between humans and computers", which in this case actually means "pay a human below minimum wage to type numbers on a keyboard".

I agree that this is marketing speech (which is a reality of any business selling a product), but you implied that their operation is human-powered with only the illusion of machine interaction, which you go onto confirm:

> Gotta love corporate marketing speak. The only thing that would make this even more ridiculous is if Captricity claimed they were using the mystical "machine learning" too. Hmm, let's check their website.

If you had bothered to read the site you linked (or if you knew what OCR stands for), you'd understand that there is machine learning at play here, and not just for chunking up the documents. You made empty speculations about a company's technology for the sole purpose of denigrating them.

You might think this is splitting hairs, but these sardonic swipes lower the bar of intellectual discourse on this forum. It's OK to speculate about the technology in play, but not when you're insinuating that it's essentially fraudulent with absolutely zero evidence.

What a disingenuous comment. The link you provided explains pretty clearly how machines are used, and that is in splicing up the documents and doing first-pass OCR on them. I imagine they're only delegated to humans under a certain confidence level.

You have zero idea what their technology looks like or what it's level of sophistication is, but don't let that stop you from posting this cynical snark.

Indeed. This article by AWS VP James Hamilton gives a unique insight into how Amazon approaches the problem of sizing data centers for redundancy:

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/how-many-data-cent...

This article is grasping pretty hard. You mean to tell me if a role was misconfigured to allow anyone to assume it, and someone guesses that role name, then they'll be able to assume it?!

The only part of the article that is interesting is the difference in error messages that allows you to confirm whether a role exists or not, but I suspect that wasn't enough content for a blog post so the scary implications of misconfiguring security policies was thrown in.

I'm surprised that these topics about McCain are appearing and sticking around. From HN's guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

If this is the new standard then it's a worrying incursion of US politics into HN.

Can someone make a convincing argument as to how McCain's death is of particular interest to hacker culture? My feeling is these topics are sticking around because they're honoring a guy that seems beloved by both sides of the political spectrum (no dispute from me there), but it doesn't change the fact that this doesn't fit HN guidelines.

Edit: And before someone mentions it, I'm aware that I myself am breaking the guidelines by questioning the appropriateness of this topic. I think it's a fair discussion to be had when neither the flagging mechanism or HN's moderation staff are enforcing what should be the principal rule of the site.

Basic metrics around platform API calls would have done the trick, no need for fancy container solutions.

edit: I would have also assumed they would get this for free from GCP's billing breakdown, but I'm not familiar with it. My first intuition when facing unexpected billing would be to figure out what the major contributor to the bill is (in this case, massive reads from FireStore), not update my frontend packages.

I can log in without issue. If you're having problems, it's probably unrelated to the Prime Day outage.

Because the entire human experience shouldn't be an exercise in neurotic min/maxing and risk avoidance. I'd rather live in a world where people occasionally smoke or gamble or have unprotected sex than one where everyone is driven by Type A obsession with health and money and living forever.

If a kid picks up a nagging but ultimately harmless nicotine habit, is that really the end of the world? Given what we know so far about vaping and its safety, I'd say you could make an argument for the pleasure of flavored nicotine outweighing the annoyance of addiction.

Journalists don't seem to need any help in damaging their reputation and the public's trust in them. These alternative distribution schemes seem to be a response to the bias and selective reporting done over the last two years.

"But -- oh, I forgot, he's American. He's a white guy. He's part of the elite. He gets to wash away his mistakes. We all know that the only people in America who are accountable for their mistakes are the poor minorities."

This is the type of comment that goes against the spirit of HN, not what mychael posted. If the above quote doesn't sound needlessly inflammatory and discriminatory to you, you need to get some perspective.

It's more correct to say that it is selectively prosecuted. Mike Flynn had his career ruined by a perjury trap that saw him lie about things much less important than a federal agency spying on US citizens.

You're right--the crime of perjury requires someone to lie while under oath, which is what Clapper did.

What would I expect him to do? Either answer honestly, or not answer the question. Instead he lied, definitively, under oath. Are you really suggesting that his ONLY option was to lie to Congress?

Agreed, it's really obnoxious. This seems like a project that should've died in the idea stage.

Having just ventured over from the topic about the beneficial effects of psychedelics, I can't help but notice in the comments how the potential benefits of psychedelics are taken as indisputable fact while a similar article about alcohol is met with skepticism and denial.

Language design can discourage those bad practices and lessen the workload of code reviews.

Catching bad practices and anti-patterns in code review sounds fine on paper, but I'm sure we've all been in the situation where there simply isn't enough time in the day to do intensive code reviews while still maintaining the pace needed for delivery.

I met a couple of a guys at a bar a few months ago. They both had on Amazon gear and, when prompted, would excitedly talk about their job at a fulfillment center and what it's like to "work for Amazon". They had worked their jobs for 1 and 2 years respectively.

Remind yourself that the warehouse employees are in areas where their choice of work would normally be Walmart or a coal mine. Working for a big name company like Amazon has as much prestige for them as it does for us "tech scene folks".

Clickbait implies that it's devoid of real content or has a misleading title. I had never heard of DTube, Steemit or Steem before this, and the title seems accurate enough. What's the problem?