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parfe

5,534 karma · joined February 17, 2010

parfe@rocketmail.com

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parfe··on GitLab 11 released
>GitLab has memory leaks. These memory leaks manifest themselves in long-running processes, such as Unicorn workers. (The Unicorn master process is not known to leak memory, probably because it does not handle user requests.)

>To make these memory leaks manageable, GitLab comes with the unicorn-worker-killer gem. This gem monkey-patches the Unicorn workers to do a memory self-check after every 16 requests. If the memory of the Unicorn worker exceeds a pre-set limit then the worker process exits. *

I know this is a Rails issue, but I cannot believe this is still a problem. I remember when the RoR folks blamed the Rails memory leaks on Zed, and Mongrel, more than a decade ago. They were obviously incorrect. Did the community simply give up on fixing the problem?

* https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/operations/unicorn...

parfe··on ‘Testilying’ by Police: A Stubborn Problem
Most defendants don't.
parfe··on MoviePass CEO says the app tracks your location before and after movies
No, they just want subsidized tickets, but then whine that MoviePass gets something out of the deal.
parfe··on Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results
You're right clicking the tiled image on the results page.

If you left click a result first to give it focus, and then right click->open in new tab you'll get the original, full size, image.

parfe··on What Is Going to Happen With Whois?
I had the same issue. Didn't realize .us required your info to be published. My registrar upsold me their whois guard service, but it sat unredeemedable on my account while spammers harvested my info.
parfe··on Ticks may be the next global health threat
Permethrin poisons cats.
parfe··on OpenBSD 6.1 released
http://man.openbsd.org/syspatch.8

Thanks for highlighting this. For me, OpenBSD releases needed so few fixes that keeping the system up to date wrapped around, and become more of a hassle to deal with! I'd get an email and have to manually rebuild something. Watching yet another flood of compiler output started feeling like a huge waste of time, despite only happening once every month or two.

For personal use, on debian I set a cron job and forget it. This utility hits the sweet spot to get me running OpenBSD again.

parfe··on Ask HN: Is there a powerful open-source Google Calendar replacement?
Check out org-mode. Handles todos, scheduling tasks, timers, you can link directly to a file or an email (not a copy, but a link emacs follows into your mail reader, such as mu4e/gnus/wanderlust, for that specific email). It will auto generate an agenda from multiple todo files spread across your filesystem.

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/orgtutorial_dto.html

There are some mobile apps but I've never used them.

parfe··on Californians are paying billions for power they don't need
How would your comment change if they had 390 million residents or 390,000 residents?

A heat wave would still put every AC into service.

parfe··on Hollywood as We Know It Is Over
Disney has nothing to do with The Land Before Times
parfe··on The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)
Lisps can do anything other general purpose language can accomplish. People still overwhelmingly choose other languages.
parfe··on Uber to pay $20M to settle U.S. claims it misled drivers
Does it matter? They're liars. Whatever justification they used for their lie is irrelevant.

edit: I thought I commented on this story topic before and found this from over two years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8523104

parfe··on Nylas Mail is now free
This is an absurd comment venting your personal gripes with US Law onto someone's product.

Which supported service is not already running in the USA and subject to NSLs? In what way is Nylas reducing your privacy?

parfe··on Using GPG to Encrypt Your Data
>We suggest that you include five words of 5-10 letters in size, chosen at random, with spaces, special characters, and/or numbers embedded into words.

>You need to be able to recall the passphrase that was used to encrypt the file.

Why bother writing security guidelines which are impossible for a human to follow?

edit: Try recalling any passphrases generated by the command below, and that's before the random sprinkling of punctuation.

    grep -E "^[a-z]{5,10}$" /usr/share/dict/words | shuf -n5 | tr '\n' ' '
parfe··on Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
"There is no Drive app for Linux at this time."

Meanwhile three years ago the message read: "Drive for Linux isn’t ready just yet"

parfe··on Ok, let me explain: it’s going to be Angular 4.0
Python 2 had an inherent flaw with character encoding. While passing data around, strings and bytes were treated as the same thing, until they weren't the same thing, at which point your software broke in horrible and unexpected ways.

Python 3 fixed it, along with some other less drastic changes. Despite a gradual and ever ongoing migration to python 3 by every major library (http://py3readiness.org/ https://python3wos.appspot.com/), a lot of HN posters love to talk about how they'll never use python 3.

The secret is: no one cares. People still use java 1.4.2 and that hasn't impeded Java.

Python 3 was a large and backwards capability breaking change that required people to learn some minor new behaviors when writing code, but it has been and will continue to be the future.

parfe··on How would we regulate software engineers?
A blanket ban on software developers lying about being engineers would be a good start.
parfe··on My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
Wonder what the odds are a phone review blogger receives a defective flagship device.
parfe··on An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Development [pdf]
>Why do comments like this get upvoted so much?

They're dressed up versions of "correlation != causation". Low thought comments appealing to people with not-even stats 101 knowledge.

There is no such thing as a perfect study, and a generic version of the OPs comment could be copy and pasted on any study ever. Unless you study the entire population of the planet, you're going to miss subgroups. Unless you study the entire population of the planet, you're going to need some sort of selection criteria. Unless you have infinite funding and time, you're going to need to make trade offs and sacrifices in your experiment design.

A study will disclose these shortcomings for readers to balance the significance of results against.

Take this complaint from OP:

>* The sample size was tiny. (20 students)

What sample size would satisfy him? Why is 20 too small? 40? 80? 1037? Is he basing his opinion of a proper sample size on his gut? 20 just doesn't feel right?

parfe··on OpenSSL Security Advisory
>Not much seems to have happened in LibreSSL since the initial rage-sprint.

Where did you get that impression?

https://github.com/libressl-portable/openbsd/commits/master shows an actively developed project

parfe··on Uber's billion-dollar losses expose the fragile state of the on-demand economy
Uber needs it, but so many companies began moving towards self driving cars as well. Is Uber even doing any in house research? Does Volvo need Uber?

Volvo can just license the Dominoes app and have the same technology backbone Uber has, plus cheesy bread.

Sidenote: I thought of another market segment to compete in: AirBNB! Except instead of daily rentals it'll be half-hourly rentals. Brilliant!

Ignore those pesky anti-prostitution laws. They're outdated regulations that just stifle the market. Plenty of guys named John that just need a bed for 30 minutes or less.

parfe··on Uber's billion-dollar losses expose the fragile state of the on-demand economy
Uber's insane valuation hinges on growing from a cab service into a Dominoes competitor? A Peapod competitor? A Zipcar competitor? An Amazon competitor? All of them? It just seems so improbable that one company would capture every single market segment that falls under "Cell phone app to get things in near-real time"
parfe··on Principles for Programming Languages for Learners
If excel isn't the first item on your list for teaching programming you're already out of touch.

Let's pretend you're a high schooler volunteering at a charity.

"Donors who attended our last five fundraisers?"

"Email list for our whale donors from this fiscal year?" (>100, 1000, 100000+ whatever)

"Who are our best fundraisers?"

"Was the dinner last week a success?"

What are the odds the student who can answer these questions is helped by a teacher who ticks off any of the five principals in the submission? Logo? People aren't drawing basic geometric shapes. "Cognitive load" referencing types? I'm not even sure how to address this. Any beginner expects 1/2 to display 0.5. That entire paragraph is nonsense. Be honest Ok, learn how to excel in your field with programming/excel/sql/etc as tools to succeed at your job. "Computer Science" isn't programming and it isn't a job. Never confuse any of those. #5 is just generic filler for being a not-bad teacher.

parfe··on I am very saddened to announce that I am quitting Tor
I read the whole drama bomb which could be a high school aged spat as easily as the adults involved in the Tor project, but this stood out:

>To be clear I believe Jake has hurt people (which he has admitted himself) and didn't respect people's boundaries. I do not believe he is a rapist or a harasser and I am wondering what the people who started this campaign are trying to achieve.

Admitting he's abusive and ignores boundaries while at the same time saying that behavior isn't harassing or rape is some Grade A dissonance. There wasn't some conspiracy. This woman even admits the guy hurts people and disrespects boundaries. The fact she doesn't have specific details about a rape or other harassment is irrelevant.

She knows the guy has hurt others, and then thinks there is a campaign allied against him?

I'd want any person like she describes removed from any communities I belong to, and not surprised the Tor Project decided the same.

parfe··on Responsive HTML Email Templates
In Emacs I use mu4e pointed at a local Maildir and sync against an imap server using mbsync (switched away from offlineimap because of UID validity issues, which is apparently offlineimap's only method of tracking messages, may be a flaw with microsoft's imap implementation, but offlineimap can't handle it).

mbsync needs (setq mu4e-change-filenames-when-moving t) so it can properly handle file moves.

Haven't used it against gmail, but because microsoft wants you using outlook only, imap is a bit buggy so you need to set PipelineDepth 1 in your .mbsyncrc IMAPAccount block because it seems that the microsoft imap server has account global variables so multiple threads/connections will step on each other.

And perversely, (setq mu4e-view-prefer-html t) has to be set because many rich html composing clients will send a text version that's completely blank, leaving you staring at a blank body if the client defaulted to text only.

You'll have to find a html rendering command that works for you. Something like (setq mu4e-html2text-command "html2text -utf8 -nobs -width 72")

Or google around for custom commands other people have published.

parfe··on WikiLeaks offers $20,000 for information on former DNC staffer's murder
>"Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks," Assange said. "As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington."

>When the interviewer interjected that the murder may have been a robbery, Assange pushed back.

>"No," he said. "There’s no finding. So… I’m suggesting that our sources take risks."

>When pressed as to whether Rich was, in fact, the leaker, Assange stated that the organization does not reveal its sources.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/10/assange-implies-m...

Assange's transparent conflation of the murder of Seth Rich with "our sources" is obvious. He won't outright lie and claim Rich as a source, but he's nakedly prodding you to form your own conspiracy theory.

parfe··on WikiLeaks offers $20,000 for information on former DNC staffer's murder
Wikileaks, and Assange specifically, keep implying Seth Rich leaked them DNC emails to attention whore on his death. Really disgusting behavior.
parfe··on The End of Gmane?
All of them.
parfe··on Helpless to Prevent Cancer? Actually, Quite a Bit Is in Your Control
>A WHtR of over 0.5 is critical and signifies an increased risk

Both measures put you in an at risk categories. Why doesn't that concern you?

parfe··on Helpless to Prevent Cancer? Actually, Quite a Bit Is in Your Control
>What's wrong with BMI for something like this?

How many runners do you know who would complain about BMI? Or weight lifters? It's the fat people who don't like it.

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