whoknowswhat11

Clickbait articles with clearly ridiculous assertions (without GPS the bank won't know if you overdrew your account).

You cannot overdraw your account because your computers clock is wrong.

You cannot overdraw your account because there is an issue with a credit card terminal around clock sync.

This simply cannot happen.

If it can, let me suggest that whoever is writing the account debit code wrap the balance check and debit in a transaction.

You can easily stick a rackmount atomic clock in your data center.

NTP can source from a variety of sources. There are digital RADIO time signals.

On a given exchange, again, you can still trade stocks. Folks forget that there used to be open outcry trading. Even without that an order book can be operated successfully without GPS.

Credit card terminals do not require clock sync with GPS links, they do not have GPS antennas in most cases. If they need precise time, they can timestamp when going through authorization steps to approve the transaction.

It's weird, as someone I guess older, the new generation seems to build such fragile system and think only such ultra complex systems are usable. Yes, things like Google's Spanner are cool. Yes, performance would degrade without GPS (maybe - I can think of some work arounds). But not everyone needs globally distributed consistent databases. You'd be surprised at how much of banking, stock exchange work does NOT depend on anything like these tools.

I wish the HN comments would focus on the many pretty obvious options one could deploy if GPS went away if you even believed that the current system means your bank account will be overdrawn because of a lack of GPS.

What a load of absolute garbage.

Banking has some of the slowest to migrate MAINFRAME workloads. These keep track of things in order, atomic transactions, synchronous writes to HA solutions.

"When you pull cash from an ATM or swipe your card at the coffee shop, the machine needs to determine the precise time that the transaction occurs to, for example, prevent it from being over-drawn."

Absolutely and completely false. You do the withdrawal inside an atomic transaction on deposit balance. This is 101 type stuff - how is this garbage getting to HN?

Goal seek also covers various optimization / iteration scenarios.

Or solver.

Options exist for iterations and maximum change directly with circular references.

https://bettersolutions.com/excel/formulas/circular-referenc...

Adding in indirect/offset/lookups/indexes etc - I've gotten surprisingly far.

I'm also OK doing VBA BUT the MAJOR downside of VBA - horrendous to share it and got worse over time for security reasons.

Excel without VBA - you can give the "program" to anyone, and almost anyone can use it (and in a pinch change it).

For those of us who have been around the block - we've been hearing from these "experts" that IPv4 is over for decades. It's boring at this point frankly.

In this case a security person appears to have used their position to change chrome for google users to display a message when they visited a website of a contractor google was working with (that was anti-union, the employee presumably being pro-union).

This sounds like a stunt someone who hadn't gone to college yet might pull, but this person was a google engineer in a position of trust / authority - not sure how the google hiring process works but she made it in.

I mean, no business is going to willing let one employee hijack the browser used by their users to spread a message the company doesn't like. Most businesses make this very clear - you can't use company resource to spread your messages (political, MLM, side hustles, religious etc).

This really (continues) to burst the trope here on HN that IPv6 is "easy".

If you look at any discussion of for example expanding IPv4 address space, lot's of "experts" come out of the woodwork claiming IPv6 is the same as IPv4 and/or that it is easy. No it is not just an address space expansion and no it is not easy for many use cases.

Even the big players (Azure / GCP) struggle to fully enable an IPv6 only or IPv6 supporting servicing offering across their products.

These are not real numbers. I've tried the "free" and "unlimited" providers. They will drop you if you take them up on their offers.

And many customers simply are not doing petabytes per month.

AWS wasn't meant to support Netflix type loads, those guys will build their own CDN's. For everyone else who wants security groups (totally for free) when some other firewall vendors would charge a small fortune to provision 1Gbps capacity for these types of services... they are fine with the price.

The other issue cloudflare doesn't understand is the bandwidth pricing they quote is for capacity (ie, 10Gbps). AWS has to have enough capacity to serve the peak, but the customer only has to pay for data used. I'm sure at low points the data is free, but maintaining the black friday / superbowl capacity is expensive, so you are paying a premium for that too.

And a lot of the complaints about both are very generalized. "Flatpack is bad package management technology" tells you very little about what is wrong with it.

Systemd was such an improvement over the existing speghetti for folks selling / supporting linux that it was a pretty clear takeoff.

Flatpack seems a bit more focused than snaps. The usability issues with snaps kind of surprising given ubuntu has usually had a good user focus. One thing, Fedora has their silverblue / ostree type distribution initiative, which may reduce their use case for using things like flatpack for printer subsystems etc (snaps seem more flexible). I moved off linux desktop a year ago though so not at all current unfortunatly.

Yep - we did a largish (300K user) site 18 years ago in PHP and static HTML. Was pretty high scale at the time with a lot of complexity and state (mysql with read replicas at the time). We didn't have concurrency totally solved but it wasn't critical and the thing ran great. If you looked at the html so so simple. HTML / CSS. I don't even think we did javascript at the time?

The toolchains now to just do the most basic form with a submit button - it's wild.

For some reason these change endlessly on my network.

RFC4941 or similar privacy extension stuff might explain this.

This pop-up love is the stupids thing ever.

The reality - they are too lazy to just put in a bait email, watch it get sold improperly and prosecute. That's all it would take, no pop-ups needed.

No kidding, reading folks talking about the innovation in this program is laughable.

This is ironically totally backwards.

The 20B+ / $2B/launch SLS program "innovation" is to not innovate! This is Apollo+, but heavier and in many ways worse and very expensive.

My own guess is that all in NASA / SLS cost per launch and program maint is probably on the range of $3B per launch if you look at the facilities list they have for this - which is super large.

Even weirder, NASA now says they want to be the anchor customer for 30 years of this boondoggle! Rather than just bidding out whatever heavy lift they need, they are going to get stuck with this crap for 30 years, which is a clear lock-in effort to avoid this thing getting cancelled out.

I am already swamped every year in California with annual privacy notices which seem to have to be mailed in paper format.

We also seem to have these cookie alert pop-ups in California - also very annoying.

Is anyone tired of this stuff rather than enjoying it? We keep on being told this is all to help us.

I find these cookie pop-ups stupid and annoying, just require a policy on the site, if I care I can go look.

I'd be far FAR more impressed if we actually BANNED these damn things and switched to a basic enforcement model where even 1% of the crap on the net got cleaned up.

Finally someone who get's it.

First - you can't actually get static IPv6 despite the claims that there is plenty of it as a home user in the US. This static IPv6 for everyone is basically a total lie.

It's super simple with IPv4 to setup an internal network with known hosts / DHCP lease reservations if needed / dns etc, and have all that stay totally unchanged as the WAN link bounces around. If you are supporting a bunch of users (who yes, will configure a printer using the printers IP etc) then this makes like simple. You can do this at home too easily etc.

There is a weird myopia in the IPv6 world about use cases for IP. It's like they just ignored what people need and want, and went a totally different direction.

We need IPv4+ with another octet and be done with this :)

I'm serious, anyone interested in trying to push this. Keep everything the same except with another octet at the front?

This illustrates as I've said how out of touch IPv6 folks are.

The demand for IPv4 is incredible right now. The value of a /8 went from $0 to close to a billion dollars.

The claim that new IPv4 space has no value is ridiculous. These ranges don't have to be perfect.

I think IPv6 folks just don't understand how high the demand for IPv4 is, it's gone UP since IPv6 came out and folks have realized IPv6 is going to be much much harder to adopt then expected. And this proposal does nothing to stop IPv6. You know your IPv6 proposal is bad when it depends on stopping others from improving alternatives :)

It's really interest, I think it's partly this attitude by the IPv6 folks that have stymied IPv6 adoption.

It's this - you are an idiot, this is a waste etc. The reality, out of the millions of users of IPv4 space, some will find some use for 0/8. Will it be worth as much as other IPv4? Maybe not. But hard to imagine it being worth zero.

The other piece, if IPv6 is so great - then this does nothing to stop the rapid adoption of IPv6 by both the major players (cloud providers) and small players.

Link to Impossible's trademark (for nutrition - they have 18)

https://trademark.trademarkia.com/impossible-nutrition-87116...

This was from 2018 (important I think).

Another was this: https://trademark.trademarkia.com/impossible-85578345.html

But the class is not a super overlap with impossible foods.

Here is impossible foods mark.

https://trademarks.justia.com/861/02/impossible-86102158.htm...

2013 was the filing date here.

With an english language word, the trademark protection is (generally) going to be a bit narrower (ie, specific class etc).

For what it is worth, at a 10 second glance this is not the slam dunk little vs big player thing.

Ha - that's pretty funny. "Has no idea who dad is. | He will post on social media and sue - 32 clicks".

I think the hypocrisy of allowing call to cancel and not doing anything about to stop it WHILE suing apple (which DOES make click to cancel a reality for subscriptions) was probably a bit too glaring.

The reason people go for the walled gardens is because the govt, which would be the natural control point, has dropped the ball totally in terms of online scams and crap.

And no, I'm not talking about going after google for the umpteenth time for some random thing - but the straight crap / lies / scams (impossible to cancel online subscriptions, bogus tech support installing back doors etc).

Jesus, HN has really gone almost full reddit at this point. For a touch more context.

"In a statement, Amazon spokeswoman Barbara Agrait said the settlement addresses how the company conducts mass employee notifications related to COVID-19. There is no required change to, or allegations of any problems with, the company’s protocols for notifying employees who have been in direct contact with a potentially infected person, she said."

I seriously wonder if all govt agencies themselves are doing sufficient mass notifications. I wonder how UC systems pandemic controls are especially with sports etc.

Full disclosure: Because the weekly testing I have to do through a lab runs $350/test and takes too long to come back I often use Amazon's COVID testing at $39. It is overnighted back to them, I generally get results back by noon the next day. Because I don't pay for the non-amazon test I do it as well.

Heads up - we should be WELCOMING foreign masters / PhD students in chipmaking - we don't need the pork, we need the people.

Taiwan in particularly, the salaries these guys get and how many there are is rediculous (low salary, lots of folks in field).

Pork is identifiable a mile away.

Space Launch System - I think the funding line both required they use a bunch of tech (only made by certain vendors) but also prohibited any competitive bidding or evaluation of other approaches. $20B later we might get a rocket that costs $2B per launch? OUCH!

More common are the funny requirements docs. 5 years of experience but not more than 10 to reserve project for "new entrants". Located in a XXX district (improvement, benefit etc).

The dislike count was useful to pick up on

* clickbait headline videos that don't deliver - ie, content in thumbnail never shows

* obviously some political content has been getting dislikes which is embarrassing and risks govt coming after them. Trump threatened this and dems are also now making noise here, so these platforms are vulnerable.

* Dislikes were pretty rare, usually in my case I had to be really annoyed at something to dislike it. I didn't mind scams that were properly described, but some stuff is annoying because it's a bait and switch.

There used to be a ton of shopping "comparison" and "review" site spam. There still is. For a while google shopping seemed better. I actually liked google's involvement.

Then they seemed to turn into ads? Now I ignore it along with most of the others as I'm sure many folks do and just shop through a few places (which is only marginally better).

I was just going to make this comment.

Postgres as far as I know uses B-tree by default.

You can switch sort order I think for this as well, so "most recent" becomes more efficient.

Multi-column indexes also work, if you are just searching for first column postgres can still use multi-column index.

It's not that simple.

If I do a blocking banner that said, we track users on this site to pay for it with ads, click OK or leave - under GDPR there are lots of gotcha's that make this potentially insufficient. I think folks claiming GDPR is "simple" do not understand it - and how complicated it is.

We have this for age restricted sites already - if you are under 18 leave, if over 18 continue, content is NSFW.

Reddit does the same thing for adult subreddits, you get a popup, this content may be NSFW, if you are at work and will be fire, leave, if not click through if you want - you've been warned.

This model however may NOT be permitted under GDPR which has a TON more requirements on tracking consent, recordkeeping for consent, versioning of disclosures, tracking versioned disclosures to consent identifiers tied to other identifiers etc. If you violate any of this you are breaking the law, are committing crimes, and may need to pay $20M or a % of turnover whichever is GREATER!

Exactly. If you read the cases, a fair number of them are gotcha type things. For example, ask yourself, if google tried to say they couldn't provide consent records (despite CLEAR language in GDPR) because they are only stored on devices - I have a feeling a MAJOR fine would be inbound.

But we get expert advice here that it is fine.

One of the claims I saw was that google hadn't said something about information being used to advertise - but when I read the related disclosure (they have all the versions) it seemed clear enough to me. I'm not saying ruling was wrong, but they in some cases hinge on issues just like this.

And we are just scratching the surface of things here.