iheartpotatoes

20 years since Melissa.

TWENTY YEARS.

And people still click on things they shouldn't be clicking on.

It is amazing the brainpower that goes into developing processes like this just to trick a person into doing what they've been told NOT to do.

I understand every new generation of user's needs to be reminded this. Of course, right? Kids grow up, and have to be taught basic online hygiene.

Maybe it is time to do away with the entire paradigm of "click to install" and have authenticated package managers for everything.

Would that solve the problem? If the only way to install software was through an "app/apt-store" where everything is fingerprinted? This reminds me of the article on HN a few days ago about enabling HTTPS and Tor for apt. I learned a lot about how apt verifies untouched packages are installed.

Why isn't that the ONLY method to add software to a computer?

Just seems like we are attacking the wrong problem. People still get STIs because they don't want to use a condom (or don't know how to use one). My analogy sucks, but if we got rid of sex we wouldn't have STIs, by definition. Ok, F for that metaphor, but am I going in the right direction?

wow. talk about "loss of service challenges".

Impossible to answer: who "won" politics? Democrats or republicans?

Eventually we go from a black-and-white rules (hell, even Go is kind of a negotiation), to using economics as a tool to determine what option satisfies all parties. I don't think humans have solved that yet, but like radiology, perhaps AI can make better compromises?

Alpha zero is a generalized AlphaGo, so they are headed in the right direction!

AlphaGo -> win this boardgame

AlphaZero -> win any boardgame (well, three right now)

AlphaMinus1 -> win any game

AlphaMinus2 -> win anything

AlphaMinus3 -> win winning. so much winning.

But you get my drift, I'm extrapolating hugely off one abstraction step.

I had no idea APT supports Tor, very cool! I don't think the OP knows that either.

Amazon doesn't sell Everlane, Gustin or Allbirds. Three clothing line's I've bought from over the past 5 years (more recently Allbirds).

IMHO /gets on soapbax/L

I think Amazon has burned EVERYONE who has used it, and would argue it has taught us to become more savvy shoppers.

The three companies I list go out of their way to be transparent about their products. This builds trust and loyalty. The faults of Amazon (and Yahoo! Shopping in the early 2000's) led to the emphasis on these new digital-shopping virtues.

It sucks. Every time I buy something on Amazon, I'm always suspicious if I'm going to get what I ordered. 95% of the time I'm satisfied, but ironically only because I buy fewer things. But I'm glad that more and more companies are going out of their way to validate themselves in the same way brick-and-mortar stores are authentic.

Yeah, exactly!

Dumb question: if the IPs are coming from Route53 for web addresses, why don't you just point them as aliases to the same load balancer? Done and done, right?

Agreed. I wish they would use the NAMES that I gave everything instead of the cryptic IDs. On the plus side, I'm improving my memory?

There are a bunch of microcharges like this that pop up, but reading your thread are you sure AWS is right for your application? You essentially can't afford it and want a free tier and near-free access? That seems a bit unrealistic. Maybe lambda isn't the right solution?

Ugh! That's the most complex explanation of AWS I've ever seen.

He just described a NETWORK, not AWS.

AWS has renamed lots of things, but all the scary text configs that used to be the domain of wizened sysadmins have been replaced with very simple single-page-app GUI controls. LIke routers and gateways: those terms are largely gone from the AWS vocabulary.

No need to get into subnets and route tables I think.

The majority of clients I've worked with use AWS for web hosting with an ELB load balancer (the most important part), an EC2 instance policy & image (for handling traffic fluctuations), an RDS (database), an S3 and Route53 (external DNS entries)

Point the load balancer to the outside world and then let it spin up instances. That's the most common model I've encountered.

IT's almost cartoonishly simple compared to what the OP wrote here. Almost. Having an understanding of network architecture helps, but not THAT much.

This is nice, but I'd like a 201-level handholding on git. I've been using it for 5 years and I'm still just a clone/commit/merge/(bang head)/push user yet I know there is tons more it can do that would probably make me more effective. (I'd also like to switch my team of SVN. Someday....)

There are instances where font matters, and I go back to TurboC on my 8086 and Fortran 'scards' on a VMS mainframe + terminal, so I'm not a whiny mod-crazy hipster.

> Fonts Creating Bugs:

Some fonts are more prone to errors. Lower case L vs number one, zero vs. capital O, braces vs parens, lowercase g vs 9. Go look at old Unix fixed fonts, and even courier and you can see how hard it is to distinguish. (Unix '10x7' was my favorite until horz resolutions crossed the 1600px.)

> Readabilty vs. Coding Style causing (literal) Headaches:

Staring at code 10+ hours a day, eyes fatigue. Some fonts are noisier than others, some fonts read faster than others, some fonts have more space than others.

And, if the coding style of the person you are reading does not use spaces between '=' or '()', or ample newlines, Courier can be a very taxing font due to all the serifs.

Lucida Mono provides a nice way out of this, but not all systems have it. Consolas solved the problem for a very long time.

> Ligature Bling

The addition of ligatures is mostly bling. I tried Firas cuz the => glyphs were nifty, but ultimately a big fat triple equals looks worse than '===' and I'd rather not waste time tweaking my goddamn font!

> Proportional

What kind of savage codes with a proportional font?

> Portability

I switched to Consolas because I can use it on Vi on macOS, Win, and *nix, and it saves my eyes from dense programming style.

That... that is very ironic. Makes even more sense that growth wouldn't respond to wage increase. Huh.

I agree this can lead to inflation, but the 90's kept it solid even with the boom, right?

The problem with this cycle: wage increase -> cost of labor increase -> goods increase -> wage increase -> inflation is, and here's where I get all Che, a fundamental problem with capital. Unless only some people see their wages increase, it keeps a lid on inflation, because there will always be exploitable labor.

So I go back to the late 1990's: why did the economy boom and wages rise without inflation? Simple: the notion of labor increases driving inflation ignores the fact that very very rich people are taking the bulk of the profits and if they weren't so intent on taking every last penny, then labor costs would NOT be passed on to the consumer.

As long as CEOs feel entitled to unlimited pay, there will always be inflation.

Odd they only interviewed business owners and employers, and not the people who benefit from higher wages.

Of course, this article scratches its head because it is assuming SKorea = USA and South Koreans = 'Muricans. Maybe we should look at the biggest driver of the economy in the US: consumer spending. Giving workers higher wages causes a boom in spending and a boom in economic growth (see: the wage increases in the 1990's and the largest boom in latter 20th century history). Maybe SKoreans just don't need to own piles of crap like americans? Maybe we should look at what historically the biggest driver of the SKorean economy is, and see if raising wages would actually increase that.

Too bad the article is so thin on actual economic history and, um, knowledge.

(this supports my claim. was that your intent?)

IDK, support for the Vietnam war was sky-high for over a decade, despite the lies coming out of multiple administrations.

Where is the primary source of this, where can I go to see popular memes?

I read HN, Reddit and sometimes /., and I guess due to my settings I miss a lot of stuff. I'm not on FB, IG or snap, is that why I'm missing these memes?

Paywalled WSJ article. Curious, does this article consider people who have to punch a clock, or is it just for the 3%-ers who can lounge in the morning?

I had a 25+ year gap in my D&D gaming. It started again when I moved to the PNW and met a couple in their 40's who took gaming very seriously, and started playing with them again. They introduced me to something I had overlooked: comic book stores that had Walmart-sized gaming arenas! Now I'm hooked again, but with people who care more about story than treasure. The amount of work my DM puts into backstory is insane, and he asks the same of us (well, not insane levels, but a commitment to character).

TL;DR - Playing D&D as an adult, with adults, is vastly different than playing as a teen.

Ah, I crammed a bunch of threads in my terse answer. We use AWS because elastic beanstalk works better for our environment than heroku. Plus with S3 integration (and Route53), we found it doesn't make sense to maintain the OS and to keep everything on one cheap platform (cheap because it can be scaled up/down very quickly). Using the LB to send everything to :80 on a VPC means our devs don't need to dink with TLS on their remote laptops.

I needed this three years ago!

My solution was to use AWS and route 443 to 80 in a load balancer. That way there IS NO MIXED content: it is all HTTPS. (And certificates are free on AWS!)

If you don't like AWS, can't you just nginx as your load balancer and do the same thing?

Why should a website care about what port traffic is coming in on, shouldn't the TLS happen IN FRONT of your website so the website can be agnostic?

The Paul brothers really give me the creeps. I'm old (50+) and don't understand them. My hipness crapped out around the time of Jackass on MTV, and this feels like the rich grandchild of that moment, except now they are entirely focused on money.

Same goes for PewDiePie. Who the hell sits down to actually watch him? I tried watching all three, and clearly I'm not their target.

The fame and influence they wield, is it more or less nefarious than using celebs to market pre 00's? It feels more so to me.

I finally understand the cultural gap my grandparents must have felt when I played my Atari 2600 all day and they just shook their heads.

Younger programmers: know less, but are more flexible learning new things; broad yet shallow

Older programmers: tired of having to be "flexible" for decades; extremely deep knowledge, siloed

Most clever programmer I saw was a guy in his 40's (in early 2000). He was a layout engineer who wrote a PowerPoint+VBA design rule checker for extremely rapid prototyping of layout ideas.

Most clever team I met was a group of 30 somethings (mid-1990s) who wrote a CPU architectural simulator that was essentially a tweak of the first linux kernel.

Most "how the fuck did you do that" was a 25 year old out of Russia who wrote a Windows 10 hack for hooking system calls for performance monitoring. He did things Windows docs said you couldn't do. All un-commented assembly. Glad I left before I had to own it!

Funny you should call this out: As an undergrad I got to choose between a prob & statistics path and a complex math / advance calc path. I took the complex math path. However, I was required to take a semester on engineering methods that touched on statistics, but that was part of one semester. As a grad student, I went down the numerical methods path for parallel computing. Not as many classes as undergrad, but still.

College: RPI. Graduation year: '91.

BSEE and MSEE with 8 years of heavy math and the fact that I still have to read the solution slowly and not really get it scares the bejeezers out of me.

The author has done some excellent work. I would love to make this kind of deep-dive compiler / optimization regression part of my own team's continuous improvement because it is so important to stay on top of, but every time I try to dive into LTO/PGO it ends up getting deprioritized. Articles like this are inspiring and informative.

That's entirely possible. The founders are promising customizations as a way of getting new sales, and I think that is the main problem here: trying to grow business faster than support. I kinda see their dilemma: they don't want to grow the # of employees TOO fast, but right now we're not growing fast enough, and the complexity of customizations is non-trivial. This might be early growing pains in an immature business. But I was bitching about the self-starter trends among new hires.

My god I hope you're correct. The problem is I'm not given a "new employee time buffer": the SLA is king, and even though I get budget to train (free lunches!!!) it isn't fully internalized that increasing customers at a rate faster than growing / training tech support is untenable.

I've been here 4 years, and some of the new-hires that came on my first year are now able to support mutliple projects and getting their sea-legs, but the burden on the senior programmers is still heavy, and I'm doing my best to retain those saints! Perhaps there will be an inflection point that doesn't involve customers and managers freaking out.

Or, heh, perhaps I'M the weak link.