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dbarlett

709 karma · joined February 21, 2011

https://www.dylanbarlett.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dbarlett; my proof: https://keybase.io/dbarlett/sigs/y9OLUSTM8TPwBy2JkKwsBTBZi3K4mOWuLSo-RPBP2wo ]

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dbarlett··on Lower Cost S3 Storage Option and Glacier Price Reduction
S3 Standard: "Designed for 99.99% availability over a given year" [1]

Standard - IA: "Designed for 99.9% availability over a given year" [2]

Glacier: "Retrieval jobs typically complete within 3-5 hours." [3]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/#Amazon_S3_Standar...

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/#Infrequent_Access

[3] http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_can_I_retrieve_data

dbarlett··on Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179140
dbarlett··on Disasters That Worry Emergency Planners Most
He also coined the Waffle House Index [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index

dbarlett··on IBM System/360 Model 67
I recently came across a z/VM manual with an unexpectedly humorous XEDIT tutorial: http://imgur.com/vUvY7B7
dbarlett··on For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes
Congratulations, you don't suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect [1].

[1] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godandthemachine/2014/03/the-ge...

dbarlett··on Show HN: AWS S3 outage test from across the world
Cross-Region Replication http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/crr.html
dbarlett··on An Oakland shooting reveals how cops snoop on cell phones
The term dates back to 19th-century telegraphy [1]. 18 U.S. Code § 3127 [2] defines them specifically:

    the term “pen register” means a device or process which records or decodes
    dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information transmitted by an
    instrument or facility from which a wire or electronic communication is
    transmitted, provided, however, that such information shall not include the
    contents of any communication, but such term does not include any device or
    process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication
    service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing, for
    communications services provided by such provider or any device or process
    used by a provider or customer of a wire communication service for cost
    accounting or other like purposes in the ordinary course of its business;

[1] https://nerdsincourt.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/on-prism-smith...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3127

dbarlett··on Inside the Goth Chicken: Black Bones, Black Muscle and a Black Heart
Mailing chicks via USPS [1] is legal and common:

    Some animals are mailable under proper conditions. See the specific         
    instructions as noted for the following kinds of animals:

    * Live bees
    * Live, day-old poultry
    * Live adult fowl
    * Live scorpions (only under limited circumstances)
    * Other small, harmless, cold–blooded animals
[1] http://pe.usps.gov/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm
dbarlett··on The story of .io
.an (Netherlands Antilles) is being phased out [1]:

    The .AN top-level domain for the Netherlands Antilles is no longer eligible for
    continued delegation, as it is no longer an ISO 3166-1 two-letter code. In
    accordance with the code’s removal from the ISO 3166-1 standard, the ISO 3166
    Maintenance Agency asks users of the standard to “stop using [the code] ASAP”†.
    
    As discussed in detail in the consideration of a similar case of the .YU
    top-level domain, ICANN’s role is to be an independent technical coordinator of
    the domain name system. As such, the ISO 3166-1 standard was chosen as the
    arbiter for what is, and what is not, a basis for country-code domains. In order
    to retain consistency with the standard, ICANN coordinates the removal of the
    .AN domain in conjunction with the transition to its successor domains. In such
    cases, ICANN asks the current operator to perform an orderly wind-down and
    transition process.
    
    The proposed sponsoring organisation for .CW intends to continue to operate the
    .AN domain while transitional arrangements are executed. These transitional
    arrangements include provisions for registrants in Curaçao to transfer
    registrations to .CW; and for registrants in Sint Maarten to transfer
    registrations to .SX. The applicant calls for a phased transition to be
    concluded over a period of three years, after which time the .AN domain will be
    fully retired.
[1] http://www.iana.org/reports/2011/cw-report-20111003.html
dbarlett··on Under the Hood of Amazon EC2 Container Service
US Standard now provides read-after-write consistency when accessed through the Northern Virginia endpoint [1].

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#What_data_consistency_model_d...

dbarlett··on Health Care Fraud Takedown
The FDIC has long recommended [1] mandatory vacation blocks as a fraud-detection tool:

    It is the FDIC's goal that all banks have a vacation policy which provides
    that active officers and employees be absent from their duties for an
    uninterrupted period of not less than two consecutive weeks. Such a policy
    is considered an important internal safeguard largely because of the fact
    that perpetration of an embezzlement of any substantial size usually
    requires the constant presence of the embezzler in order to manipulate
    records, respond to inquiries from customers or other employees, and
    otherwise prevent detection.
The idea has spread in recent years [2].

[1] https://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/1995/fil9552.html

[2] http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/easy-street/credi...

dbarlett··on Health Care Fraud Takedown
At a hackathon back in 2013, someone mentioned analyzing Medicare claim data to find impossible or improbable scenarios, like a doctor performing two lengthy procedures on the same day at hospitals 500 miles apart.
dbarlett··on RedditStorage
Packet juggling http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/juggling_with_packets.txt
dbarlett··on Get Your Shit Together
I have a password file encrypted with key that has been split into five shares using Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme [1]. I printed out the shares, instructions, and file URL and hand delivered them to five trusted individuals in different states. Any three of the five can reassemble the key.

[1] http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/

dbarlett··on Get Your Shit Together
https://www.deadmansswitch.net/
dbarlett··on Why Good Developers Write Bad Code: An Observational Case Study [pdf]
GitHub [1] and Bitbucket [2] do that.

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/closing-issues-via-commit-m...

[2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Resolve+i...

dbarlett··on Wego: a weather app for the terminal

    telnet rainmaker.wunderground.com
dbarlett··on Amazon Machine Learning – Make Data-Driven Decisions at Scale
https://console.aws.amazon.com/machinelearning/home?region=u...
dbarlett··on The Rise of the ‘Unicorns’

    One of the most commonly invoked takedowns of the ever-increasing and
    mind-blowing valuation levels the company has achieved — $40 billion at
    last count — is this:
    
    "Investors are valuing Uber as if it's bigger than the whole taxi market!"
    
    The implication?
    
    Investors are nuts.
    
    Well, investors are indeed valuing Uber as if it's bigger than the whole
    taxi market.
    
    But it turns out that that's not nuts.
    
    In its most mature market, San Francisco, the four-year old Uber is already
    bigger than the local taxi market. Much bigger, in fact.
    
    According to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who spoke at the DLD Conference in
    Munich on Sunday, the taxi market in San Francisco is about $140 million
    per year.
    
    Uber's revenues in San Francisco, meanwhile, are running at $500 million
    per year.
    
    That's more than three times the size of the taxi market.
    
    And Uber's revenues in San Francisco are still growing at about 200% per year.
http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-san-francisco-20...
dbarlett··on Google warns of unauthorized TLS certificates trusted by almost all OSes
Etsy built a tool to log CA certs at their network perimeter [1]:

    During the two months we’ve had CAWatch in operation,
    we’ve seen only 61 unique CA certificates cross the
    wire. This accounts for slightly less than 29% of the
    212 total CA certificates installed by default in our
    standard build
[1] https://codeascraft.com/2013/07/16/reducing-the-roots-of-som...
dbarlett··on Reinventing the Mail Truck
Background on the current Grumman LLV (Long Life Vehicle): http://postalmuseum.si.edu/collections/object-spotlight/llv....

Working video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qahIvBF3d7g

dbarlett··on Does Amazon Web Services Pricing Follow Moore's Law?
There's an old joke that AT&T was really a billing company that happened to offer phone service. You could say the same thing about AWS.
dbarlett··on Venture Capital in the 1980s
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908463
dbarlett··on Lack of CSPRNG Threatens WordPress Sites
This is a very slanted piece. Read the original Trac ticket [1] instead. Arciszewski's original patch wasn't merged because it was overly broad, lacked unit tests, and had whitespace problems. He also started emailing one of the lead developers directly [2] instead of the security team, then got up in arms about lack of response.

[1] https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/28633

[2] https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/28633#comment:25

dbarlett··on Layoff Underway at IBM
Some you've probably heard of:

* Etsy https://www.etsy.com/about/

* Patagonia http://www.patagonia.com/us/patagonia.go?assetid=68413

* Seventh Generation http://www.seventhgeneration.com/responsibility/certificatio...

* Warby Parker https://www.warbyparker.com/culture

dbarlett··on Soviet Cosmonauts Carried a Shotgun into Space
Not to be confused with the 23mm cannon fired from Salyut 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun
dbarlett··on Amazon Starts Email Service for Companies
"a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-de...

dbarlett··on A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on AWS
You can also configure HA NAT with an ICMP heartbeat: https://aws.amazon.com/articles/2781451301784570
dbarlett··on “How Secure Is My Password?” Strength Meter Open Sourced
This is significantly more optimistic than Dropbox's zxcvbn [1]:

  Password                   hsimp                zxcvbn
  qwER43@!                   3 days               3 hours
  Tr0ub4dour&3               344 thousand years   22 hours
  correcthorsebatterystaple  A quintillion years  65 years
[1] https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn
dbarlett··on As smartphones come with barometers, new apps will improve weather forecasting
Samsung's purported rationale for dropping the FM radio in the Galaxy S4:

  Our studies show a trend shift of interest to digital broadcasting, specifically
  – focus on listening to music content in social networks or on the channel
  YouTube. The flagship model of our products are focused on customers who use
  digital content, which use modern formats and channels of information
  consumption. (translated from Russian).
http://blog.gsmarena.com/samsung-explains-why-galaxy-s4-lack...

I can't image carriers are upset about it.

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