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sciurus

16,407 karma · joined January 19, 2011

I'm a principal engineer at SurveyMonkey based in Atlanta, GA. My personal website is https://www.polibyte.com
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sciurus··on Mozilla HTTP Observatory
For anyone curious, you can find the source code at https://github.com/mozilla/http-observatory
sciurus··on Terraform is not the golden hammer
Relatedly, I'm pretty sure the earlier statement

> For some resources like RDS or EKS, it won't check if the resource already exists or not. So if it's missing, nothing is going to happen as it's marked are deployed in the tfstate file

is also wrong.

sciurus··on Firefox UI is incredibly frustrating,so I made it like the old days of Chrome
In your screenshot the active tab is easily distinguished to me. It has a border around it and appears raised above the other tabs.
sciurus··on HAProxy vulnerability enables HTTP request smuggling attacks
Agreed jfrog has the more in-depth exploration in this case. Still, James Kettle from Portswigger has donegood work in this area; I'd recommend anyone who's not familiar with HTTP request smuggling read https://portswigger.net/research/http-desync-attacks-request...
sciurus··on Ex-Googlers raise $40M to democratize natural-language AI
> Last time I looked, an Intel Xeon motherboard has max ram of 128GB so scaling up to 350GB RAM is not going to be cheap or trivial to build.

Even a low-end tower server can be configured with multiple terabytes of RAM.

E.G. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/povw/poweredge-t640#tec...

sciurus··on FCC Temporary Waiver Permits Higher Symbol Rate Data for Hurricane Ida Traffic
Let me think of some things I've done recently.

1) Helped someone launch, track and recover a high-altitude balloon. We used APRS on the 2M band as the primary mode of tracking. You can see balloons in the air right now at https://tracker.habhub.org/

2) Carry in and set up a low-power radio and antenna at a riverfront park, then make contacts with people at home and at other parks. You can read more about that at https://parksontheair.com/ . I'm hoping to try a mountain instead of a park soon, see https://www.sota.org.uk/

3) Get up at odd hours of the night to try to make contact with amateurs in Hawaii on some bands and modes I haven't used to communicate with that state yet. I'm tracking this for my worked all states award from the ARRL, and did it recently because it was the https://www.hawaiiqsoparty.org/. that's an example of one of the many contests that exist in amateur radio.

4) Listen in on a regional HF net taking reports about conditions in areas affected by Hurricane Ida and relaying them to govt agencies as appropriate.

5) Listen in on a local 2M repeater where I heard other hams discussing their lives and hobbies related and unrelated to amateur radio.

sciurus··on Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)
Same for me using LastPass.
sciurus··on The secretive, semi-illicit world of WhatsApp mango importing
I think the title is bad and you're missing details due to skimming. The author walks through the entire process the mangoes he is purchasing go through, including irradiation at a USDA-approved facility.
sciurus··on An old hacker's tips on staying employed
Often some variations on https://staffeng.com/guides/overview-overview
sciurus··on Growing object-oriented software vs. what I would do
I don't know anything about the other two books, but the one discussed in depth is well-respected.

http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/praise.html

sciurus··on The 5-Hour CDN
I'll echo what Simon said; we share some experiences here. There's a potential footgun, though, anyone getting started with this should know about-

Request coalescing can be incredibly beneficial for cacheable content, but for uncacheable content you need to turn it off! Otherwise you'll cause your cache server to serialize requests to your backend for it. Let's imagine a piece of uncacheable content takes one second for your backend to generate. What happens if your users request it at a rate of twice a second? Those requests are going to start piling up, breaking page loads for your users while your backend servers sit idle.

If you are using Varnish, the hit-for-miss concept addresses this. However, it's easy to implement wrong when you start writing your own VCL. Be sure to read https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/hit-for-miss-and-why-... and related posts. My general answer to getting your VCL correct is writing tests, but this is a tricky behavior to validate.

I'm unsure how nginx's caching handles this, which would make me nervous using the proxy_cache_lock directive for locations with a mix of cacheable and uncacheable content.

sciurus··on Firefox lost 50M users since 2019
There is a year of lag, but you can read Mozilla's financial statements and Form 990. The latest ones are linked at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2019/
sciurus··on Starlink review, four months in
Some low-density parts of the US have fiber as well thanks to programs like https://www.usda.gov/reconnect
sciurus··on Windows 365 Cloud PC
The announcement explicitly says that this is Azure Virtual Desktop.

"Windows 365 is built on Azure Virtual Desktop, but it simplifies the virtualization experience—handling all the details for you. "

sciurus··on DoD cancels $10B Jedi contract
This is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750770
sciurus··on FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters
To me the ARRL membership is worth it for the magazines and email newsletters.

"Seriously lacking" is a good description of their website overall, though.

sciurus··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)
Mozilla | Remote

Mozilla exists to build the Internet as a public resource accessible to all because we believe that open and free is better than closed and controlled. Join us to work on the Web as the platform and help create more opportunity and innovation for everyone online. We're hiring for a number of SRE and security roles right now, including

* Site Reliability Engineer, Services Team (US or Canada): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/3069852/

* Site Reliability Engineer, Data Team (US or Canada): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/3185802/

* Senior Manager, Security Engineering (US or Canada): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/2451569/

sciurus··on Duolingo S-1
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27668370
sciurus··on User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment
I bailed on the captcha after 3 tries. It was infuriating, which is my experience with real captchas more often than I'd like to admit.
sciurus··on I wrote a children's book / illustrated guide to Apache Kafka
I've (rightly) never seen Why's Guide marketed as being "for children" though.
sciurus··on How fighter jets lock on, and how the targets know (2014)
Absolutely.

These are still a source of interference on the amateur bands. You can find more info on that at https://www.iaru-r1.org/spectrum/monitoring-system/iarums-r1...

sciurus··on How fighter jets lock on, and how the targets know (2014)
The military doesn't need GPS to work from inside a house.
sciurus··on Grafana 8.0
Link discussing new features in more detail: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/whatsnew/whats-new-i...
sciurus··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)
Mozilla | Remote

Mozilla exists to build the Internet as a public resource accessible to all because we believe that open and free is better than closed and controlled. Join us to work on the Web as the platform and help create more opportunity and innovation for everyone online. We're hiring for a number of operations roles right now, including

* Senior or Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Germany preferred, Eastern Time possible): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/2444504/

* Site Reliability Engineer (US or Canada): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/3069852/

* Manager of Operations Security Engineering (US or Canada): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/2451569/

sciurus··on America has a drinking problem
If you like hop-flavored beverages, definitely try Lagunitas Hoppy Refresher.
sciurus··on America has a drinking problem
They're decent, and definitely towards the top of the pack of non-alcoholic beer brands. Clausthaler is also ok if you prefer a lager to an ale.

(I spent a couple months trying every variety of non-alcoholic "craft" beer that I could get my hands on earlier in the pandemic)

sciurus··on [dead]
This was published Oct 26, 2020.
sciurus··on 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning
If only someone would come out with an electric truck...
sciurus··on Send: A Fork of Mozilla's Firefox Send
Yeah, those files are for https://projectfluent.org/
sciurus··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2021)
Mozilla | Remote

Mozilla exists to build the Internet as a public resource accessible to all because we believe that open and free is better than closed and controlled. Join us to work on the Web as the platform and help create more opportunity and innovation for everyone online. We're hiring for a number of operations roles right now, including

* Staff Site Reliability Engineer (US, Canada, or Germany): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/2444504/

* Site Reliability Engineer (US or Canada): use the staff posting since this one isn't up yet

* Manager of Operations Security Engineering (US or Canada): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/2451569/

* Services SRE Manager (US or Canada): https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/2318454/

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