thanatos_dem

Yes, I would like to see all declassified intel indicative of any foreign power performing a cyber attack on us. Is that somehow controversial?

> direct usage of syscalls instead of libc

But go isn’t built on top of C? Why would they add more dependencies that complicate and slow down the compilation process and hurt portability?

If you make the bet in Bitcoin, losing is less damaging to you than winning is prosperous.

I understand your frustration, but that’s a remarkably similar response that people had to automobiles first being introduced. Not to imply you’re a Luddite clinging to your horse drawn carriages or anything. Just that these concerns aren’t new.

The unfortunate reality is that nothing has solved the last mile problem for public transportation as well as these scooters have.

Say you want to go to the store two miles away and don’t have a car. What are your options? Walk for an hour round trip, take a slow bus if you’re lucky enough to have both where you are and where you’re going on a bus route, or overpay for an uber/lyft/taxi, which due to their cost structure are generally less cost effective for shorter trips.

I agree the safety issues are of concern, but there’s really no better solution currently to that problem, which has been the hardest problem to solve since the advent of public transportation.

From a bit of searching, it looks like the individual responding to the disclosure emails is a patent attorney, claiming to specialize in bitcoin patents.

I’d be terrified to have him be my lawyer for anything, given his responses here. Artinfo is clearly dead in the water at this point, and I can’t even tell if he is the actual owner of it, or just a legal representative.

The security issues are terrible, but it’d really suck to have your company torpedoed by your unhinged IP counsel.

What a productive comment...

I agree with the parent comment. Some of the tooling is a bit rough around the edges from a UX perspective, but has been getting better over time. But in terms of software built by developers for developers to solve real developer issues, Hashicorp produces some of the most consistently useful and well built software I’ve ever used.

Tools like Consul and Vault have become a staple in a lot of the companies doing cloud. It’ll be interesting to see what happens as CNCF picks up steam, but it’s been great software nonetheless.

Much like many posters here, I have some preset responses that I send to recruiters. In particular, it’s a “I’m not looking right now, but I’ll save your info and let you know if my situation changes!”. This worked really well when my startup fell apart, and I was able to “scramble the jets” and get interviews set up within a week at a ton of companies. I think that the author confused “polite” with “passive aggressive” (or maybe it’s a cultural difference between my country and Germany).

I always try to leave recruiters with a positive impression, so as to not burn future bridges.

...except Herman Search. Every single recruiter has approached me flashing large salary numbers for boring, stressful sounding financial tech jobs, and being pushy/downright aggressive when I don’t show interest. I’ve asked every recruiter to put me on their do not contact list, but still, every couple of months, I get another generic male white frat bro recruiter, new to the company, reaching out again with the exact same tact. It toes the line between unprofessional and confrontational. With all due respect, which is none, fuck Herman Search.

I really hope that the website itself is running serverless on AWS, because that would be a great learning opportunity!

It's quite easy and common to wreck a database when you have it hooked up to serverless infrastructure. Depending on the DB, there can be a significant amount of overhead for each client connection. Postgres is particularly bad at this, since it spawns an entire process for each client that connects. This is why connection pooling is so important for applications.

Serverless is a different beast tho; every function is isolated, so having a client pool is much harder/impossible. If you get a flood of traffic, and your function interacts with a DB, you suddenly have a ton of non-multiplexed client connections, which is all it takes to bring many databases to their knees.

If this is a serverless website, I can't wait for the author's next article, describing this issue and how they addressed it. If it's not serverless... add a client pool.

It’s using the title of the article directly. Go yell at Forbes for being click-baity.

Yup, I was wondering how the hell a timeseries database would run in the browser.

Nope, this is just syntactic sugar on top of calling (up to) 4 JavaScript functions.

How many hours does the author think it should take to set up an iPhone? If they want every toggle and every accessibility option presented at device setup, with enough explanation of what each one does and how to use it, it’ll take at least 2, probably more since the elderly tend to use technology slower.

You know what the author didn’t mention? That with any Apple device you can go in for a 1:1 session or a class on usage, and the people running them will walk you through everything. They’re also good at identifying people struggling to use the device in various ways and know about all the accessibility options, which in general are more plentiful and much better supported in iOS than Android.

My mother got an iPad after years of owning only android devices, went in, and not only did they walk her through it, but they let her know that a new iOS release would be coming out soon which would change a few things, and invited her back to a second session after that change if she was at all confused.

The setting is in the Watch app. It’s Passcode > Unlock with iPhone. It used to be pretty hit or miss, but with the new OSes it’s worked really consistently.

And I’m not really suggesting anything about the WiFi. I know remarkably little about the network infrastructure in foreign hotels and embassies. Just that there are mechanism in iOS that could feasibly make this possible, rather than immediately jumping to a Turkish surveillance cover up.

You know, Occam’s razor and all that jazz.

If he has signed into hotel WiFi and his fiancée was within range of that, the phone and watch would remained connected over the WiFi network.

WRT claims that they used his fingerprint to unlock the watch, that isn’t supported, but if it were within range of a paired phone and put on a wrist, it would unlock when the phone is unlocked, potentially via Touch ID.

Edit: If I were to speculate (which is all any of us can do) I would guess that the latter is how they got access to the watch, and he and his fiancé had a family iCloud account, which the files automatically uploaded to via his phone.

Here’s a video from 2011, but it’s only at 1 trillion FPS using the same laser pulse approach - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-fSqFWcb4rE

Also, the music is pretty cringey, so I’d just leave it muted...

If you have your tests within the same package, they can access the private members of structs directly, which helps avoid some of the mess.

If you’re in a different package things aren’t too bad if you have meaningfully abstracted interfaces. And with Go’s duck typing, even if you’re using another package that doesn’t have good abstraction, you can create your own interfaces with the functionality you need for mocking purposes.

Google+ still had 500,000 users? That’s the only really surprising part to me.

Given other people's response, I'm clearly the odd one out here, but I found it buggy and infuriating to use. I wanted what I can't imagine is a unique shortcut, "Good Morning", which should:

- Set the volume to 50% on my home pod

- Start playing an ambient radio station in Apple Music

- Start a slow fade in on my bedroom lights

It's been a nightmare, and I finally gave up altogether. I got my shortcut configured and set up with Siri. It's pretty simple, being only 3 steps, so I don't see where there's that much room to go off the rails, but oh boy does it.

The HomePod responds, and says "okay, running your shortcut". It then sets the volume on my phone to 50% and starts playing music there instead. It then tries and probably 80% of the time fails to set the home scene to turn on the lights. When it fails, it says "Please continue on your iPhone", where Siri's output states that it doesn't understand, as if I misspoke something to it... but it's running a set list of commands, there's no room for me to misspeak when setting the HomeKit scene. And clearly the shortcut triggered since it's now playing music at half volume a foot from my head.

And there's no way that I can tell to have it specify an AirPlay speaker to play out of. I don't get why the home pod, which responded to the request in the first place, can't play the music. If I tell it to play the exact same playlist directly it does so just fine. Maybe I'm "too advanced", being a tech person myself, but this really feels like basic stuff, and it seems to have missed the mark by a wide margin.

Ah, you’re right, I was looking at an out of date list of board members.

So they’ll only need to hire 1 additional woman. The bill requires there to be at least three women on boards with six or more members. Not pairity, just 3.

So Alphabet will need to add two women (currently 8 board members, 1 woman). Apple, Tesla, and Facebook will need to add 1 (7/2, 9/2 and 9/2 respectively). Uber surprisingly enough already has 3 female board members, so they’re all set. That’s all assuming that this bill sticks of course. I’m sure there’ll be some heavy opposition to it.

I’m a bit surprised Alphabet’s board is one of the more gender imbalanced right now among the giants.

So no example in particular then?

One huge difference for enterprise users is release cadence.

OpenJDK will be updated much more rarely, on a quarterly cadence only, including for security patches. So if you go the OpenJDK route, be ready to do some JDK-level patching yourself if you want to mitigate any zero-days that surface.

Fixes will also only be applied to the latest versions, so you'll need to be prepared to live on the bleeding edge and accept all the risks that come with that.

“all seeking to capitalize on the soaring value of digital currencies, like Bitcoin”

Given the trend the last few months, I’m not sure “soaring” is the adjective I’d choose...

Looks awesome! I rarely use PDFs and even more rarely create or edit them, but I hope you do well.

I’ve long thought that dealing effectively with PDF or other complex, crufty formats is a good candidate for a “shlep blindness”[1] style startup, and I hope it works out for you.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

In general it's true for all positions. A CEO should be fire-able for the board to keep them accountable. We never got to the size where we had a board tho, so we didn't have anyone to appeal to apart from the investors directly, and as I mentioned, the CEO kept us isolated from them.

The bigger problem I had with lack of control was when things started to go south. The CEO was never around, so I was the "boss" in the office every day, being the technical and cultural leader of the dev team, who came to be close friends. Once the money stopped coming in, it was really hard emotionally to be the person who needed to convey that to the rest of the company, but without having any real control needed to get them money or real answers.

The CEO came from a very wealthy family, and never had to worry about money. Myself, and most of the employees weren't so lucky, and were pretty new out of college, so didn't have a pile of savings to fall back on. I am not even that upset about never seeing that pay I was owed, it was more just emotionally draining to be seen as an authority figure, but to have absolutely no ability to exact change or get answers when they mattered most.

The bigger issue with lending in Mexico is a bit deeper than the sketchiness of some of the big banks. In particular, there is no reliable credit score system, so determining credit worthiness is a crap shoot. There is actually a credit reporting agency, but nobody reports to it, so nobody is really sure why they're there.

A lot of citizens also (understandably) don't trust the banks and keep most of their money at home. As a result, there's very little data available to make credit determinations on, since you can't even use most people's record of good standing with their bank accounts, so the process for getting a loan is generally sit in a room with a group of bankers and try to convince them you're a swell guy/gal and won't lose their money. This results in extremely high default rates, because people are good at misrepresenting themselves and lying about their intentions [citation needed].

With such high default rates you only really have two options; improve your credit worthiness determination process somehow, or increase interest rates and have an effective (if unethical) collections process. With some data protection laws making the creditworthiness determination route a legal minefield, most banks in Mexico opted for the latter. Our entire business strategy was to take the other route.

Luckily, nothing too exciting happened. We were operating in the financial tech space in Mexico, trying to make lending less comically predatory (a standard small business loan in Mexico can have close to the same interest rate as a payday loan in the US).

With that goal in mind, we were targeting areas in Mexico that needed the most help. Cities with a decent small business sector, looking to grow, and having difficulty doing so. Juarez was a perfect fit, especially given that a lot of citizens have been across the border and can see how much better things can be. My parents were not amused. Then the movie Sicario came out soon after, and they were somehow less amused. But I got to ride around in armored vehicles with a security detail, so that was fun.

Really my "learned not to fuck with the cartels" lesson came from our market research. This may surprise you, but the banks in Mexico are... sketchy. Well, not all of them, but definitely a few. In particular, we were in a competing market as Banco Azteca. It appears to have since been removed, but at the time, the Banco Azteca wikipedia page described it as having "a uniquely effective debt collection system" or something like that.

Yeah, what they actually have is a motorcycle gang. They give you a loan with massive, often times impossible to pay off interest rates, and if you don't pay them back, motorcycle dudes with bats show up to collect, or take enough of your property to make up the difference.

Fucking with cartels is expensive and stressful.

Armored cars and armed security are nice and all, but being in a situation that necessitates riding in an armored car and armed security detail is not really fun.

CEO would disappear for months at a time, with the promise of returning with capital. We never really knew where he went, and he wouldn’t let anyone else talk to investors (including me, who was CTO). Eventually he stopped paying us, but promised that the money was just tied up in the parent company set up in the caymans.

After 2 months of not paying myself or any other employees, the COO and I drainked the remainder of the US account and paid out as much of what was owed as we could to the employees before helping them find jobs elsewhere. I didn’t get any of the money I was owed and was facing pretty bad debt, but the experience was enough of a resume boost that I didn’t have a problem making it up in my signing bonus.

What I learned is that a title doesn’t grant you any control, and that if someone can’t be transparent with their inner circle of friends and colleagues (in this case cofounders), then they have no business leading a company.

Also leaned to not fuck with the cartels.

For several years, Palantir's main product had, hidden deep inside of a stack of preference windows, a button simply labeled "Find Terrorist". It was a bit of an inside joke, since at the time the software was treated as a magic box that solved all your problems, and when it was still focused on government use cases.

but you know who doesn't joke around? The government doesn't joke around. So yeah, as soon as it was found by a user, that button was immediately removed. It's just a shame that some contexts are deemed "too serious" for an obviously lighthearted addition with no real detrimental effects.

At least some software has managed to maintain their humor, like Phabricator - https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

For sure!

Del Maguey Vida is probably the most common mezcal. If you go to a bar and ask for mezcal it’ll likely be that, and it’s actually pretty decent for the price point, especially for cocktails.

If I’m going for something smokier and for sipping rather than mixing, I am a big fan of Delirio Anejo. It’s pricier, but still pretty easy to find at larger liquor stores, and has a great flavor profile, using two different agave plants (Espadin, which is pretty common in Mezcal, and Madre-Cuishe, with a more mineral flavor that compliments the smokiness).

If you want to get more serious about it, and as I mentioned in another comment, you can check out Vago Mezcal by Aquilino Garcia Lopez. He produces a whole collection of similarly prepared mezcals using different varieties or agave, so you can really compare flavor profiles. Pricier and harder to find, but great for learning about the differences.

If you haven’t had any tequilas or mezcals, probably the bare minimum info you need is that there’s three main preparation styles - silver, reposado, and anejo, each being aged more than the previous. Usually this results in different colors - clear for silver, light yellow for reposado, and a whiskey-like darker brown for anejo.

Generally aging will make the tequila more smooth and flavorful, so you’ll want to focus on reposados and anejos if you aren’t mixing drinks with it. For mixed drinks usually you want the flavor of the mixers more than the liquor, so that’s when you’d go for the silver.

Some of my favorite drinks with mezcal are a Paloma, replacing the tequila with mezcal, and with some hellfire bitters tossed in. It’s sort of like a spicy margarita, but the grapefruit has a bit more sweetness which balances out the smoke and spice.

Also, I love a last word, replacing the gin with mezcal. It’s a good bit more bitter, between the chartreuse and the marsaschino, but I’m a fan of bitter drinks.