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krab

1,505 karma · joined July 18, 2013

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/sedlakf; my proof: https://keybase.io/sedlakf/sigs/AH6fjmT6N2YaOyOdA8xtZeUeo8x8FVRPRt5NBOQr0Ic ]
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krab··on Computer Security Is a Political Struggle
Analogies time!

I saw this big shiny vault had a side door unlocked, Your Honour. This vault stores my money as well, so I wanted to see - surely they wouldn't let burglars in just like that. I didn't break any lock, I didn't pass any sign. When I saw the door indeed led to the money, I left and wrote the bank a letter.

krab··on Just disconnect the internet
Maybe knowing there are many institutions on the network is a good motivation to keep services secure. It's apparent any hospital or vendor may be breached. So if you overcome the false sense of security, the separate network will give you another layer of defense.
krab··on France high-speed rail traffic disrupted by 'malicious acts' on Olympic ceremony
What's this? Is thrftwy an account intending to convince people they really need to invest heavily into their armies and stop whatever Russia is doing?
krab··on Defense of Lisp macros: The automotive field as a case in point
That ship has sailed. C and C++ have macros so that line may do actually anything.
krab··on Parable of the Sofa
That's a part of IKEA's appeal. Because of the consistent quality and the extensive market share, there's a lively secondary market for the furniture. At least in Europe. You simply cannot sell (or even give away) similarly priced furniture of other brands but there's demand for second hand IKEA.
krab··on Don't microservice, do module
Tell this to Instagram or WhatsApp before acquisition. ;-) They have scaled well enough, IMHO.

On the other hand, I agree that for the larger teams, microservices make sense. It's much easier when you can roll back a failed deployment and block new releases just for your service, while the team tries to fix it. Also, monitoring and resource accounting is easier. All at the cost of some inefficiencies compared to a monolith.

krab··on Don't microservice, do module
Not really. Even with a monolith, you get partial availability. Most often as a default.

Imagine a web server handling requests. It usually has a way to recover from a crashed request handler. On top of that, you have multiple web servers behind a load balancer. Some code paths may be failing, some may be available.

Then, you have some background workers, maybe ingesting data from third party services. They're completely different processes from your web servers, even though they still use the monolithic code base. If they're down, the web app can still work with stale data.

The partial availability can be compromised in microservices as well as in a monolith (e.g. auth as you mentioned).

krab··on Cement recycling method could help solve one of the big climate challenges
Northern Africa has a lot of cheap land and a lot of sun. Wind, too. Steel can be then transported (it is already shipped across large distances). You would have to solve maintenance, but that should be doable.

The main obstacle for investment is political stability and alignment.

krab··on Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe
Well, from my point of view, the war just makes all of this only worse. I imagine going to the Crimea for a family vacation isn't a great prospect with the risk of bombardment or even a takeover.

But that's probably something where we differ. I view this Russian attitude as "we can't live as well as we'd like to so we'll at least make other suffer too". This is completely self-inflicted.

krab··on Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe
I mean, you could have travelled there even before the 2014 hostilities began. So it's not like you gained anything in that regard, right? Now if Russia loses it, the travel there might be more difficult for some time.
krab··on Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe
How do you (or anyone) personally benefit from "having Crimea"?
krab··on Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe
I don't see any attack on ethnic identity. Supporting Russian imperialism doesn't have anything to do with ethnicity. If anything, such support only hurts the Russian nation. I'm talking not only about the current loss of life. For at least the next twenty years, the Russians will have much harder time doing business with EU/USA.

Such attitude has downgraded Russia in the world's eyes into an "armed gas station". I. e. can buy from them when they'll behave more or less, but don't expect to do any serious partnership.

krab··on What contributing to Open-source is, and what it isn't
If they really need it, they'll fork it.
krab··on My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack
Not really. If I don't agree to on-call, I do it on best-effort basis. That is: "Oh, I'm camping with kids without a computer. I'll try to help you as much as I can. Did you try Z after X and Y didn't work? Ok, try it and call me back how it went, I'll try to Google something in the meantime." If that would happen too often (more than 1-2x a year), I would try to improve the process or consider switching my job. And my phone is silent during the night.

I wouldn't call this a permanent on-call, just being responsive.

krab··on My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack
You usually get some extra money for the duty. And if you get woken up, the hours you spend are counted towards your normal working hours - so you aren't expected to show up in the morning after putting out a fire. Or you get some more bonus (like 2x hourly pay for the night work). That's about the balance when people are ok doing it.

But it depends on stability of your service. If it is messed up and people are woken up often, then you won't find many volunteers if they have other choice.

krab··on My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack
I know this from a few startups and it really is not that bad. You really triage what should wake you up and what's ok until morning. It works well as long as the technical founder is ok playing a goalie and essentially being always on call (even though others catch a lot of alarms).

It stops working when the company grows and no one understands the whole system and you need on-calls from several teams. Then the company does some formal on call rotation and it's fine again. It hurts during the transition only.

krab··on Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images
Possibly. Also in my country (in EU), the home insurance doesn't cover your liability for an accident like this. That would be another type of insurance you buy extra.
krab··on Easy Mode Rust
The self-modifying code mentioned in the Macros section could be automated in an IDE! That is, your IDE should be able to show you the expansion of a macro at that specific place. This feature would help me much more to understand what's going on than navigation to the macro source.

I'm not sure if there are any IDEs supporting (temporary) macro expansion already. The output showing all macros expanded is usually too verbose.

krab··on Unikraft Launches KraftCloud: Never Pay for Idle Again
Looks awesome! Trying to use it for a toy project, I realized you almost always need some persistence layer. I see you support volumes and you have some guides about deploying databases. How does that work? Are they also "scale to zero"? Why is Postgres special? Referring to the "contact us" mention.

Or if I want to "bring my own DB", what are the latencies to other providers? Can I somehow host a DB in the same datacenter as you are?

What do you recommend for serious usage when I want low latencies app <-> DB and I don't want to lose any data? :-)

Another question - is there something like cron?

krab··on Why Has Figma Reinvented the Wheel with PostgreSQL?
You're right we could. In fact, it was a single server until about 2 TB. We considered a larger server and in fact at that point we could have just added a few more disks. But we still decided to shard.

First, the data size is growing and we didn't really know the growth rate in advance. Sharding gives you some flexibility in the infrastructure sizing. And yes, you don't want to wait until the last minute.

Second, it helps us to spread the disk I/O. Possible on a single machine if you're a little bit careful with disk types and sizes. But again, the overall load still grows.

Third, all the bulk operations take a long time on a single server. Each of the distributed servers takes about an hour to back up and 2-3 hours to restore. I'd feel uneasy if it was much longer.

krab··on Why Has Figma Reinvented the Wheel with PostgreSQL?
It's AGPL so you can self-host. You can even pay someone to host it for you if you don't like Microsoft's offer. I find it easier than rolling your own AND self-hosting.
krab··on Why Has Figma Reinvented the Wheel with PostgreSQL?
We use Citus. Very similar performance properties to DIY sharding but much more polished. Currently at 7 TB, self hosted. Growing roughly at 100 % per year, write-heavy. Works fine for us.
krab··on The ü/ü Conundrum
That's the English transliteration. Don't forget that other Slavic languages also transcribe according to their own rules.

For example in Czech, Валерий would be transliterated as Valerij because "j" is pronounced in Czech as English "y" in "you".

krab··on TinySSH is a small SSH server using NaCl, TweetNaCl
A tool based on Dropbear that does exactly this, automatically.

https://github.com/ViktorStiskala/cryptsetup-ssh-unlocker

krab··on Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
In my understanding, the most important part is to not share user information with third parties. IIUC, Google can use Google analytics data to join your behavior from multiple sites and then use that to serve targeted ads.

The next level is to not store PII unless there's a specific reason in the user's interest (improving site quality doesn't count, logging in does). Therefore, you can see how many people visited a page, aggregates of device types etc. Just not anything that identifies an individual.

krab··on Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law
But this is exactly what the article is saying.
krab··on Parsing the Postgres protocol – logging executed statements
What's not open source about AGPL?
krab··on Weak rules allow ultra-processed foods like Lunchables on school menus (2023)
Huh? I never had crackers with ham and cheese. Certainly not to replace a lunch. And what's bad about broccoli? Our kids like it steamed. It's a handy snack for a family trip - you can prepare it in a microwave in a few minutes when you're packing.

You're right that it essentially boils down to the dietary preferences of the parents. If the parents are ok with such lunch as described in the article, there isn't much a regulation can do.

krab··on Using my new Raspberry Pi to run an existing GitHub Action
It lets you manage containers in your actions. Nesting containers is not straightforward in many cases.
krab··on Why does the `reset` command include a delay? (2017)
My Gnome terminal only scrolls on CTRL+L or CTRL+ALT+L but it actually clears the buffer after the clear command.
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