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em10fan

90 karma · joined August 22, 2019

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em10fan··on The ‘fat service’ pattern for Go web applications
In my past experience, any decently long lived bit of software (i.e. 5-10 years) goes through migrations to at least 2 different database engines (Usually as part of various other migrations like on-prem->cloud, or due to some licensing/$ reason) over its lifespan. And when you do it does tend to be quite a bit of work.

Same goes for java app containers.

em10fan··on Ask HN: Where Is the Silicon Valley of Europe?
Cambridge for embedded stuff
em10fan··on Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?
Get a copy of the Open University (UK distance learning uni, been around since the 70s) books on EBay.

A full set of books for MU123 (The most basic maths course, basically school [age 16] level books) can be had for under £50 on Ebay. Work through them, then move on to the MST124 books which are college [age 18] level), and are also widely available on EBay. Those begin to cover cover calculus, vectors, etc...

I'm 1/3 of the way through doing a maths degree with them, having scraped a C at school almost 20 years ago.

em10fan··on GitHub Is Down
> Are they missing a check to see if their homepage is responding?

I would be surprised if the health page is actually connected to their realtime monitoring system

In most cases these things are updated manually.

em10fan··on DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing
Yeah, we used Hetzner in Germany a lot at a former workplace where I was for a number of years, for production traffic, and we had a good experience. Most of our other infra was in physical DCs we owned, but we used Hetzner for production DR for the EU region, and also for internal stuff like CI/CD. Was slightly more reliable than AWS was at the time (2011-2014ish) , if I recall!
em10fan··on Contabo object storage EU server is down but their status page reports all good
In my experience (Fintech), status pages aren't actually hooked up to monitoring systems, they are updated manually.

But yeah it sucks that they haven't noticed and updated it.

em10fan··on 20 Years of .NET
companies more so than the tech, I do Java in the banking space and its the same story.
em10fan··on Amazon to stop accepting UK Visa credit cards
They aren't that common.

Only 2 of the high street banks offer them, and one is moving away from them.

The rest are all Mastercard.

em10fan··on Amazon to stop accepting UK Visa credit cards
Other than some occasional small restaurants/pubs, and a few small indie shops, its basically accepted everywhere here in Edinburgh, I have a corporate amex and use it for expensing business dinners very often, and supplies from office shops, supermarkets, etc..
em10fan··on Amazon to stop accepting UK Visa credit cards
Totally agree.

All the major banks apart from Barclays and HSBC use Mastercard for credit

em10fan··on Amazon to stop accepting UK Visa credit cards
Quite the opposite in the UK, at least over the last 10 years or so.

99% of debit cards are Visa, and most people buying stuff on Amazon would be using a debit card, folks only really use credit cards for large purchases and things like travel, here.

Even when it comes to credit cards, I would say Mastercard has like a large chunk - like 80% in terms of institutions (but who knows in terms of actual customers), I would say.

Barclays and HSBC are the only majors that do Visa as far as I know. And Vanquis which is a junky one for people with bad credit.

The other majors like Lloyds, TSB, Bank Of Scotland, Halifax, Natwest, RBS, are all Mastercard. Same with most smaller banks like Virgin and CapitalOne, and store branded ones like Sainsburys/M&S/Tesco, too, as well as the remainder of the popular bad-credit cards like Ocean, and Aqua. Mastercard.

em10fan··on Ask HN: How do you assemble a computer in 2021?
Basically the same as in 2010, except disks are now commonly NVM/.M2 rather than regular SATA, and SSDs are a lot cheaper.
em10fan··on Netflix paid £3.2m in tax on £940m of UK subscription revenue
Revenue doesn't mean profit.

Netflix makes hardly profit, so thus pay little tax

em10fan··on Life Saving Therapy Inhibition by Phones Containing Magnets
Many men?

If you are wearing a suit, a smartphone makes the trouser pockets bulge a lot, so it's common to keep it in your shirt pocket or jacket inside pocket - Both of which is next to your heart.

em10fan··on CD PROJEKT’s co-founder’s statement on Cyberpunk 2077
> Taking your beautiful game that you've spend 5+ years on building and hacking it to pieces to run on older hardware

My understanding is that it was the other way around, which is why in my eyes there is no excuse for how badly it runs - It wasn't a case of adding support for older consoles at some point in development, rather, the PS5 etc... didn't exist (even as a spec) when they first started development of Cyberpunk, and as far as I had heard, they actually added support for next-gen something like halfway through development. They had no idea really of when the next gen consoles were going to release when they started it.

em10fan··on [dead]
"You need to sign in or sign up before continuing."

how about no

em10fan··on Ask HN: Why is “Open VPN” so aggressive against reading the source code?
There is an open source version AND a commercial version, which extends it.

The binaries they provide the latter, which are are commercially licensed and include proprietary parts, bound by those terms.

em10fan··on America’s ‘Fried Chicken War’
I had it in Atlanta and it was great.
em10fan··on Ask HN: eInk Word Processor
eInk would be a poor choice, the flash caused by updating the screen, every time you type a character, would be extremely fatiguing.

This refresh would be very very slow on a decent size screen which would lead to a very noticable typing lag.

I imagine it would also cause rapid wear of the screen, too.

In the few cases of EInk screens being used for signage, they avoid having things like clocks on there, for that reason, and they structure the display so its actually built of many different panels, which can be refreshed individually.

em10fan··on Ask HN: Where to Host Dedicated Servers?
We used Hetzner in Germany, when I worked for a startup a few years ago, for some stuff which was getting too expensive on AWS, and which had to be located in Europe for certain reasons. A lot cheaper and reliability was good. We had many tens of servers there, at one point, at least.
em10fan··on Dissection of COVIDSafe (Android): Australian government's contact tracing app
> Non-compliant. The CovidSAFE application heavily uses source code from https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-android which was released under GPL v3

That's not to say its non-compliant, they could have reached out to the (one) contributor and licenced it separately.

em10fan··on Ask HN: Who’s in a Hiring Freeze?
UK employee of a US company, its happening in both, contractors are gone everywhere and the US side has been particularly brutal with pay cuts - 7-10% here and 20% cuts in the US (50-100% for VPs and stuff).
em10fan··on Ask HN: Do you have an e-ID?
When registering for a doctor or something, you generally just tell them where you live and your name. You might also need your national insurance number. If they want more, its usually a utility bill proving that, or if they want photo ID, a Driving Licence or Passport, if you have one.

For things like voting, you don't need any ID at all on the mainland.

em10fan··on Google is cutting summer-intern pay by as much as 50% in countries like Canada
I'm surprised they got paid at all, let alone anything more than minimum wage.
em10fan··on Ask HN: Do you have an e-ID?
No - We don't even have a single standard state-issued physical ID, here in the UK, let alone an electronic version.
em10fan··on Ask HN: Who’s in a Hiring Freeze?
Here in the fintech/banking industry is not just frozen, but we have shed most of our contractors to protect jobs, and are giving fte engineers pay cuts
em10fan··on Ask HN: What are the lockdown *factual* impacts on your job?
> The market is in trouble.

To elaborate on this,

1) Banks are worried people won't pay their mortgages/loans/cards and they will crash 2) Banks therefore don't buy our stuff, or will seek to pay less for it. 3) We therefore look to cut costs

Everyone is taking the cuts, because there aren't any other firms recruiting right now.

em10fan··on Ask HN: What are the lockdown *factual* impacts on your job?
Engineering got 5-20% pay cuts, (50-100% at VP level and above), all perks cut, all the contractors got laid off, as did anyone low-skilled in Ops who has been there less than 2 years.

We are the UK arm of a US fintech.

The market is in trouble.

em10fan··on Ask HN: Why would you release your source code under a license like MIT of BSD?
> I guess my question is why would you want companies to be able to use it for free? Why not release under a viral license with a commercial license also available?

The amount of hassle it takes in most companies to licence software from a third party vendor is so immense that generally they will spend far more in $$$s to write it themselves instead.

Your average small hobby project or helper library isn't going to every make you any money that way, only something which is both very large/complex, and very desirable, would.

> Why is a large company using your MIT licensed code a good thing? Do you expect to eventually get paid for that work, or get recognition, or what?

It looks good on your CV and might get you a job there.

em10fan··on Ask HN: Why would you release your source code under a license like MIT of BSD?
If you want people to use it.

Companies are not that keen on GPL in any form.

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