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lwhalenon [dead]

Don't forget "raid 0 on your hand rolled ec2 db instance". A lot of the other stuff is forgivable, that right there is downright dangerous.

lwhalenon Intel brings a six-core i9 CPU to laptops

Great. Can we get > 16GB RAM while we're at it? :-)

lwhalenon One of Estonia's first "e-residents" explains what it means

if they were prone to revolution, you'd think "get a danged job" would be the path of least resistance (pun fully intended).

lwhalenon One of Estonia's first "e-residents" explains what it means

Is it bad if they just fall by the wayside? If one puts forth zero effort, they should get zero reward.

lwhalenon Responsibility Deflected, the CLOUD Act Passes

So, here's a question. I'm a small self-hoster, US-based. If the "London police" come calling asking for my data, what repercussions do I face if I just say "No"?

lwhalenon Types of People Startups Should Hire, but Don’t

LLC/S-Corp/whatever, if you're doing this, you're going to want to make friends with a CPA, and an attorney. Everybody's needs on this front is going to be highly individualized, the couple hundred bucks spent on advice from these two professional friends are going to pay staggering dividends later.

B) Not in my experience. W2 employees have a 20% overhead for various insurances, taxes, etc. There's also significant employment law one has to follow to a T, 'or else'. Consultants, you can be a little looser with.

C) Not disagreeing on this one, but there's also _tons_ of smaller shops and startups who have expensive problems a consultant's specialized knowledge/experience may be uniquely suited to solve.

D) As a non-smoking overweight single male, my 'gold plan' insurance on the west coast is ~$400/mo. At consultant profit margins, that is effectively 'lolwhatever' money.

E) This is yet another example of why hourly billing is nuts. Don't bill hourly. Bill per-project, and charge for the business-value of the work to the business. Considerable literature has been written on this, see works by Jonathan Stark, Alan Weiss, etc. tl; dr - if you're billing hourly, you're doing it Wrong(tm)

F) Strong agree. But just because one may hate writing/speaking/meetings/selling doesn't mean one can't A. learn it, and B. learn to excel at it. Would _you_ take a course on public speaking and read a book on negotiation if you were reasonably certain you could make your current annual income in a quarter's worth of work?

lwhalenon Types of People Startups Should Hire, but Don’t

This is why a documentation culture is so very important. Even on the best terms, the average tenure of a tech employee is two years. That's just today's economic reality. As a leader, a project should not be considered 'done' until its documented to such a level that a well-meaning new employee can come in, read the docs, and be mostly up to speed with at least the daily 'care-and-feeding' tasks and the top 5 failure modes.

lwhalenon Types of People Startups Should Hire, but Don’t

OP should register himself as an S-Corp, hang out a shingle, and market it as a consultancy. Now the pay triples, your short stay at various companies is downright expected, and everybody's incentives align - OP wants to do the best work he can in the shortest amount of time possible (so he can move on to the _next_ client), and his employers^Wclients will pay more to collect on the value OP's work provides sooner. Ironically, if you start spending more than a year at any given client, future clients will start to get antsy about '...why were you there so long? Are you a foot-dragger? What's the matter with you?" This is why you should NOT do hourly-billing, to make sure everybody's incentives stay aligned as described above. :-)

Difficulty level: stop thinking of yourself as a 'programmer' or an 'engineer', and start thinking of how your programming/engineering work impacts the business' bottom line. See: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

tl; dr - humans are weird.

lwhalenon Circular Shock Acoustic Waves in Ionosphere Triggered by Launch of Formosat‐5

I'd be curious to know roughly how long the disturbance lasted. Did it dissipate/recover in minutes, or did it stick around for the better part of a day (or two, or three)?

lwhalenon Guide to Slack import and export tools

Come hang out in #lopsa on Freenode, we never left ;-)

lwhalenon Guide to Slack import and export tools

I know in general there's the whole "the company pays for it, the company owns it, the company can audit it" corportesse oblige, enshrined in case-law yada yada, but one of the things I always liked about Slack was it seemed to have a bit of that old counter-culture sneer around "yeah, that may be true, but we code for the user anyway". This is very much an anti-user, pro-corporate maneuver, and I think it's a shock to many who took Slack's long-time messaging to the contrary at face-value.

lwhalenon Schools Are Spending Millions on High-Tech Surveillance of Kids

Home-schooling, and/or private schooling

lwhalenon Gusto launches a free HR product for small businesses

They do what they say on the tin. It's just that easy. If you're a small business owner, go get ignored by ADP for a couple of quarters (and pay them 2x Gusto's rates), send the late-filings notices to your increasingly-exasperated accountant, and bask in the warm indifference of a massive corporate behemoth who (thankfully, mistakenly) believes they're the only game in town. Then switch to Gusto, and try to describe to us how different it is, without glib hyperbole such as "...everything. And it's amazeballs!"

lwhalenon Gusto launches a free HR product for small businesses

Thirded. Struggled with payroll through three other (terrible) companies, have been DELIRIOUSLY happy with Gusto. Please oh please, don't ever change (or lose focus)

lwhalenon Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

This "You were born into implicit bias/racism" shtick sounds an awful lot like religion's "You were born into original sin" shtick. The fix is almost identical too: give us money, attention, and spread the word, or else you're extra double-plus ungood and we'll shame you harder.

lwhalenon Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+

Having been with Samsung since the S3, my current S7 will be my last. It is THE most fragile phone I have ever owned - replaced 3x already, at $150/pop even with the insurance. I've never had to get a case for any other Samsung before, but this is unacceptable. My next phone will be a Purism.

lwhalenon The Great Puri.sm Outage of 2018

And this is why I use gandi.net for all my domain registrations. As their tagline says, "0 bullsh*t". Such has been my experience with them for the last ~20 or so years.

lwhalenon Remington Is Planning to File for Bankruptcy

"AR" comes from their original manufacturer, Armalite. The "Armalite Rifle 15" was a downsized version of the AR-10, chambered in 7.62.

lwhalenon Experimental Drug Promises to Kill the Flu Virus in a Day

I've said it before and I'll say it again: GODS I love living in the future! I don't even care that I don't have a jetpack.

lwhalenon Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice

We have cured cancer in mice many times. The trick is getting it formulated for humans in ways that are similarly effective and non-lethal. Put another way, signs of efficacy in mice is necessary, but not sufficient, of a human-applicable treatment.

lwhalenon The Quantum Theory and Reality (1979) [pdf]

I think I can approach a layman's explanation to this (feel free to correct me if this is offensively inaccurate). My understanding is that 'observation', at a quantum level, isn't like "watching something with your eyes". A better description would be "taking a measurement" instead of "observation". It's impossible/difficult to take a measurement at the quantum level by passively observing, you have to de-facto interact with it in order to measure it - not unlike searching for a house of cards in a dark room with a blindfold on. Once you've 'found' the house of cards, you've 'interacted' with it, and in the process of interacting it is no longer a house of cards any more.

lwhalenon Ask HN: What’s your favorite talk from 2017?

Chalk this up to 'things I wish I didn't know', but it's a neo-nazi slogan/concept of 'fourteen words' (something about 'saving the future for white children', yada yada) and 'heil hitler' - 'H' being the 8th letter of the alphabet. '1488-types' are a reference to the type of folks who buy into that horsepuckey.

lwhalenon Inside America’s Growing Bulletproof Clothing Industry

https://www.theboxotruth.com/the-box-o-truth-1-the-original-...

Handguns are handguns. Rifles are rifles.

lwhalenon The Sedona Cult of Bentinho Massaro

Nice broem, broheim ;-)

lwhalenon Fixing the MacBook Pro

I have a $job-provided MBP with the touchbar, and I find it actively evil. I am _constantly_ resting my fingers in the general vicinity of the top row, which triggers F11-type behavior, volume changes, esc-key hits, etc. It is a _damnably_ sensitive gimmick, pressure-sensitivity would improve it, but in general its a solution looking for a problem. In its current incarnation, I do not like it at all.

lwhalenon Amazon’s Seattle campus is using a data center next door as a furnace

Are there any data centers up that way, by chance?

lwhalenon Let's Encrypt now holds 35% of the market

I greatly appreciate the comment giving further context to your downvote. That is all too rare around here! Big criticisms I have around the recent Microsoft server offerings:

- Opaque and uncommon/needlessly-unfamiliar command-line management toolkit (seriously, what is so difficult about 'output text, receive text as input' in 2017?)

- I cannot, yet, fully manage a Microsoft host from the CLI. What I consider to be 'fully managed' revolves around: installing software, updating software, adding/removing/'managing' users, setting up basic server-like features such as simple firewall rules, viewing common log-files ('user X logged in', 'software Y tried to execute Z task, the result was A'), starting/stopping/troubleshooting daemons, etc

- Pick a major config-management system (my direct experience is with Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt). Configuring them to play nice with Windows-anything is an order of magnitude more difficult than even the most baroque *nix-like operating system.

- Licensing. Srsly, charging for the operating system, THEN the web server, AND the 'remote desktop server', PLUS the mail server... is downright punitive. Microsoft does exactly none of these 'well', but they still think they should be able to charge money for it. Their customers, in my opinion, must be masochists.

Lest I be accused of being completely unfamiliar/anti-Microsoft, here's a couple of things I feel they do quite well:

- remote/centralized user management (seriously, Active Directory's extensions and integration of LDAP/Kerberos are quite impressive). Pity it's not even remotely open-sourced, as such any modifications (hesitant to use the word 'improvements') are effectively prohibitively difficult to bring forward unless you're a Microsoft employee, directly assigned to the Active Directory group, in good standing with your direct manager and his manager's manager.

- AAA (authentication/authorization/accounting) - given their AD prowess above, they'd have to be a special kind of stupid to foul this one up. To their credit, it is amazingly easy to assign RBAC to a group of users and apply it site/directory/'forest'-wide, then go back and bean-count exactly which users did what and when, if needed. For a lot of environments, this is a huge plus.

Still, for the vast majority of 'webby' environments, in my professional opinion, Microsoft hasn't been able to hack it for at least a decade now. The market has moved on to more powerful, less costly, more manageable/scaleable platforms. If you're running an application, or even serving basic web content, on a Windows-anything, you're needlessly wasting your business time/money/agony if you choose to implement it on a Microsoft stack.

lwhalenon Let's Encrypt now holds 35% of the market

Not trying to start a Slashdot-class flame war or anything, but why are you on a platform that is so... belligerent to being on a network? Microsoft has been dead to me in the datacenter for at least ten years, for reasons far beyond the peanut-gallery "hur hur M$ $ucks!" There's oodles of options, many of which are far simpler to manage than a Microsoft stack, with commercial support available. I'm genuinely curious, what's keeping you there?

lwhalenon An in-depth security review of the Intel Management Engine

The company who built your motherboard

lwhalenon Vision Insurance Is Making Glasses More Expensive

THIS. Before Lasik, I was all about the Zenni Optical.