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surfer7837

75 karma · joined August 25, 2020

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surfer7837··on Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failures lead to false convictions
> Offline is very hard. A lot of bugs happened due to trying to make Horizon v1 work with flaky or very slow connections, and losing transactional consistency as a result. The SOTA here has barely advanced since the 90s, instead the industry has just given up on this and now accepts that every so often there'll be massive outages that cause parts of the economy to just shut down for a few hours when the SPOF fails. Should there be more focus on how to handle flaky connectivity in mission-critical apps safely?

If there's a network partition you have two options: accept reduced availability and keep your consistency, or have better availability and have reduce node consistency. Not much else you can do, that's just life.

Obviously, ways to increase consistency with consensus algorithms etc with 2 phase commits, and you reduce consistency with consensus algorithms. Depends on your requirements.

surfer7837··on TOFU: Do You Check?
Wouldn't that require a responsible body (ie a CA) to verify who they say are. Not sure that's needed for SSH
surfer7837··on Toolship: A more secure workstation
Docker is not a trust boundary CMV
surfer7837··on How we got customers to sign up to Monzo in the early years
Kind of hard to determine if you're a UK tax resident without some details, no?
surfer7837··on My Poor Experience With Azure (or why I'm sticking with AWS)
No-one uses Elastic Beanstalk -- use ECS instead. With ECS Copilot you can do it in 1/2 commands.
surfer7837··on Skyrim on Mac When?
Doubtful, especially on a 3G/4G connection. You're not an average user if you're on a Gigabit connection running the latest CPU
surfer7837··on Skyrim on Mac When?
Nah this page load instantly for me, I like it. All Bootstrap websites look the same to me.
surfer7837··on Show HN: Stacktape – Full power of AWS with Heroku-like experience
Appreciate it's just an MVP but I think there's a good niche you can go down. Big Data on AWS is such a pain to set-up (Glue, EMR, RedShift, LakeFormation), with IAM policies and roles a simple data pipeline is around 500 lines of YAML. Would be good if you could add native support for that, so say you have some CSV in S3 you want to convert to parquet, drop null fields, and then make shareable with another AWS account. Would solve a massive problem for me
surfer7837··on In defense of simple architectures
Just boils down to not optimising until you need to. Start with a 3 tier web app (unless your requirements lead you to another solution), then start with read replicas, load balancing, sharding, redis/RabbitMQ etc
surfer7837··on Ask HN: What is your Git commit/push flow?
GitHub/Gitlab allow you to rebase your commits when merging. We do that, but has the disadvantage of mucking up things for people who are using that commit. I personally think it’s worth it
surfer7837··on Apple bans accounts of developers from Belarus
That's the point. It's so they can pressure their government
surfer7837··on Docker for Mac Without Docker Desktop
No company is going to touch Virtualbox without a 10ft barge pole. The licensing is so easy to get wrong and before you know it you’re writing a cheque to Oracle’s legal department
surfer7837··on You Don't Need the Cloud
But wait until your master worker falls over and you have to promote your read replica. RDS handles everything for me, I just have to monitor it and be ready for any alerts from Promthesus.

I mean I’d say cloud providers measuring everything is a pro. I’ve been at companies in the past that have lost track of all their physical tin. One machine had been doing nothing for 5 years

surfer7837··on You Don't Need the Cloud
> RDS. It’s slow and super expensive. I don’t want to worry about one-off queries or migrations. If you use only 5% of your server capacity you can afford to do inefficient things at times.

The author has clearly not had to do a database migration at 3AM. AWS is more expensive but so is my time, so it works out better all the time.

Isn’t computer science all about building on abstractions? Where do you draw the line? Should I write a kernel every time because Red Hat /MSFT charges me $100?

surfer7837··on Ask HN: How to build a light weight personal blog?
I made a minimal Jekyll theme. No advanced CSS or extra JS, and super light weight so any page loads quickly

https://github.com/lewisrobbins/sebasic

surfer7837··on Some Apple engineers rewarded up to $180k in stock bonuses as incentive to stay
This is only a good thing for us. More demand/competition should mean wages rise
surfer7837··on Advent of Code 2021
Am doing it in Haskell. Every year I do it in Haskell, and then promptly forget half the language until I start it in December again
surfer7837··on Tell HN: GitHub is down again
Don't create a Github account with your name then?
surfer7837··on Gitlab servers are being exploited in DDoS attacks
How can you protect yourself from file upload threats? It's basically the worst possible threat model -- executing complex user input that conforms to a spec that was written 20 years ago by some proprietary company with no security.

Executing everything on an isolated container with no permissions? Audit trial etc/good logging? If someone comes up with an RCE you're basically done for, you can only mitigate it but not completely stop it.

surfer7837··on Localstack – Local AWS Emulator
We use Typescript and jest for the mocks. Probably about 10%, they’re very simple mocks, all they do is return success and in a few unit tests we make them return failure and then test how our app responds.

I can’t really say if it pays off but it has caught some issues, would like to expand them more and implement more logic in then to check arguments etc but haven’t been able to yet.

This article is similar to what we’ve done

https://dev.to/elthrasher/mocking-aws-with-jest-and-typescri...

We also have a pipeline that does e2 work tests and canary releases to hopefully limit the blast radius. If we encounter >10 errors in a 1 minute period we roll back and the team are alerted

surfer7837··on Localstack – Local AWS Emulator
I prefer mocking my AWS calls, so much more lightweight and means exert developer doesn’t have to install local stack
surfer7837··on Ask HN: Book Recommendations
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
surfer7837··on AWS's Egregious Egress
You go on to AWS for their managed services like Fargate, DynamoDB, ECS, S3 etc. Have used OpenShift in the past and had endless problems with cluster stability (especially in 3.x), and weird inconsistencies.

With AWS I could just spin up 10 Kubernetes clusters with pretty much unlimited resources, can't do that in OpenShift because you'd hit a resource quota or limit.

surfer7837··on Taking students from schematic to silicon in one semester (2018) [pdf]
The VLSI I took for my EE degree was the hardest course by far. I did a digital logic project and the amount of time I spent looking at my traces and trying to figure out what went wrong, only to forget to ground my P-wells or make one of transistors too small. Maybe I just wasn't good at it but have a lot of respect for people who do it professionally.

There's also MEMS which is basically making sensors (even motors) out of Silicon.

surfer7837··on Ness – Deploy web sites to your AWS account
Doesn’t AWS Amplify basically do the same thing? That’s how I deploy my static site
surfer7837··on Green gold: Avocado farming on the rise in Africa
I recommend Rotten on Netflix [1] that has an episode about Avocado farming. The whole series is super interesting anyway and explores modern day issues such as lack of water, climate change and globalisation.

[1] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80146284

surfer7837··on Apple Reports Second Quarter Results
blew it out the park

AAPL is up 3% after hours (so $60bn or so)

surfer7837··on Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account
I'm now enjoying a 12 hour ban from Twitter
surfer7837··on PureScript and Haskell
Anyone know how I can write an AWS Lambda in PureScript? Do I just need a JS wrapper and then call my compiled PureScript from that?
surfer7837··on Boeing 757 cargo door opens after takeoff
I thought all modern aircraft had plug doors [1] that means it cannot be opened in flight? Unless the pressure difference was so low it didn't matter in this case?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_door

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