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lurchedsawyeron Ask HN: Are people still using Pascal?

TransportForLondon are currently looking for Delphi developers...

lurchedsawyeron Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them

But the whole point is that it is not true. There have been experiments and what the anegdote fails to mention is that step one in boiling the frog by slowly increasing the temperature is removing its brain.

But don't take my word for it: https://archive-srel.uga.edu/outreach/ecoviews/ecoview071223...

lurchedsawyeron Mitchell Hashimoto takes on a new individual contributor role at HashiCorp

Hopefully he'll have some time to learn YAML now /s

lurchedsawyeron Getting fired from your job as an Amazon worker by an app

It would be interesting to see how Amazon would deal with an EU employee who invokes their GDPR art. 22. rights.

lurchedsawyeron Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

"Yes, but authentication won't make the boat go faster"

lurchedsawyeron Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

Sorry to break it to you but these TODOs are a measure of technical dept you've accrued by limiting dev work to issues and stories.

lurchedsawyeron Cool retention hacks for your startup

Sounds like a quick way to end up in a personal spam filter to me...

lurchedsawyeron Ask HN: Why there is no drug to convert fat into muscles?

Convert visceral fat into antimatter thus solving space travel while you're at it /s

lurchedsawyeron Why Bother with What Three Words?

The behaviour you're describing is actually supposed to be a feature. They call it "Error detection" on https://what3words.com/about, which apparently it's not.

lurchedsawyeron Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

Mostly a privacy and ownership issue: Spotify doesn't own the device receiving their service nor are they paying for the bandwidth used for the ad payload, and it's none of their concern how these are used. In the end it all boils down to whether Spotify's right to run a business supersedes a person's rights of ownership.

lurchedsawyeron Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

More like "We sent a free pizza to their home. How dare they not eat the pineapple toppings!?"

lurchedsawyeron A New Largest-Known Prime Number

See? Squirming. Somehow multiplying 0 factors is supposed to result in 1.

I'm not saying it's incorrect, but you have to explain that edge case away. At the same time allowing 1 to be prime would remove that problem given that e.g. 6 = 2^1 * 3 ^1 and 6 = 1^81 * 2^1 * 3^1 are the same unique factorisation because, well, monoids.

Edit: `s/fields/monoids`

lurchedsawyeron A New Largest-Known Prime Number

It's not, though. It's one group of mathematicians appropriating prime numbers and jack-booting them into their favourite theorem. There are valid reasons to treat 1 as a prime number, just as there are for defining 0^0 as 1 in some cases. Also for a fun pastime try asking an arithmetician to apply the fundamental theorem to 1 and watch them squirm.

lurchedsawyeron Microsoft says 40 percent of all VMs in Azure now are running Linux

Nothing against GCP. It's considering Azure as an alternative that I object to.

Here's a couple of ideas:

1. Linux support. If you look in Azure documentation they never say they support any Linux distro - they "endorse" a couple. Amazon provides their own for of Centos with all the conveniences like having the AWS CLI pre-installed. Incidentally Azure is the only cloud platform where I've had machines kernel panic randomly.

2. A consistent interface. The Azure portal has been under development for over 2 years now but you still need to use the "classic" interface for some settings.

3. Database support. Other then MS SQL Server. MySQL is supposed to be in beta. It's been in AWS since 2009. Also Amazon is developing AuroraDB which is, supposedly, optimised to work in AWS.

4. Availability zones. Again in preview in Azure but have been in AWS since 2008. What's also interesting is, up until now MS marketed "Availabilty sets" as the Azure version of AZ. One is a guarantee that a box will be spun up on a different rack within the same datacenter, the other guarantees the box in a separate DC.

5. A consistent API. And I don't mean the definitions being immutable - that's actually handled with schema versioning. I mean getting the correct responses. Although unchanging API would be nice as well.

Here's an example: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz59vPCFY-fham1qN1E1MnZBcl... (3mb video). What basically happened was, I would deploy my environment, run Ansible against it and get errors/unconfigured nodes. So what happens in the video is: I run 'for i in 1 2 3; do azure vm list; done' and get three different responses: a list of VMs, an error message saying I have insufficient access rights to list the VMs and an empty list. All are incorrect. The first one is the closest to the truth but it's still missing one box. I get eventual consistency is a thing, but this was >30min after the boxes had been provisioned.

So to answer your question as to what is needed for Azure to become a viable alternative to AWS: I would say about 10 years.

lurchedsawyeron Microsoft says 40 percent of all VMs in Azure now are running Linux

It WOULD BE great to have alternatives to AWS.

Here, fixed that for you.